


There's a lazy moon outside right now

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Compliant, Drabble Collection, F/F, F/M, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2019-10-11 22:56:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 38
Words: 28,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17455850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: A collection of free-write drabbles originally posted to tumblr. Various pairings and universes (see titles of chapters). Most are stand alone but the notes will explain if I have written other stories in the same universe. Title is from "29" by Saves the Day.For drabbles and ficlets written before 2019, see "Watching the moon moving to the ocean shore."





	1. Raven & Gina: Sharing a Bed

**Author's Note:**

> Written January 7, 2019.
> 
> For the100--positivity's Ladies Appreciation Week Day One: Favorite female character (alive) + favorite fanfic trope.

Four weeks after Mount Weather, when Abby clears Raven to leave med bay, and return home to sleep in her own bed, Raven discovers that she has no home, and no bed, to which she can return. Her temporary quarters have been permanently reassigned. She considers making a joke about heading on back to her old rooms in Mecha, but it’s a hard sell: she can barely even hobble down the corridor without leaning heavily on her cane.

It’s Gina Martin, at last, quiet and funny and hardworking Gina Martin, from first year Earth Skills, from Mecha, from old days that Raven has almost forgotten, who overhears her griping and swoops in to save the day. “Just share with me,” she offers, her hand on Raven’s arm, her smile gentle and soft. “Until everything gets straightened out.”

The first night, Raven lowers her body onto the mattress, and realizes that it’s been a long time since she shared a bed with someone else. Not since Finn. He used to let her stay the night at his place when the situation in her own quarters was particularly fraught, and it was this gesture, perhaps more than any other, repeated whenever she needed and always ending with his arm around her and the safety of that space between his body and the wall, that made her fall for him. She thinks about it now and feels, despite everything, almost fond.

Sleeping next to Gina is different and she feels it right away. Gina pulls back the covers on her side of the narrow bed with care. She toes off her shoes and slips them not-quite-completely under the bed. She keeps a single lantern on the small table near the bed, and she watches it as she arranges herself beneath the blankets, as if afraid, though the table is sturdy, that it may fall. And Raven watches her. She considers the space between them: narrow, but enough. She considers the sweet kindness with which Gina, without thinking, offered up her room to share; and how she never looks tired, though she’s flitting about Camp Jaha all day, being helpful wherever she can, in med bay often and that’s how Raven has come to know her again; and how in the lantern light she looks, for once, a little worn.

Gina rolls over onto her back and stares up at the ceiling, her fingers curled along the blanket edge. Raven is lying on her side, on her uninjured leg, one hand beneath her pillow.

“This is nice,” Gina says, and Raven startles. She was expecting the opposite: a guilty admission of regret.

Gina’s eyes flick to her. She seems hesitant, now. Raven realizes her silence has stretched on too long.

“It is,” she agrees. “I—I thought maybe you’d change your mind.” Then she smiles and adds, “Not that you should. I am pretty great. Great conversationalist.”

“Oh, I can tell.”

Raven feels a slight bubble of laughter, rising up. Gina is next to her, warm, near, giggling with her in the dark.

“I was waiting for a room to myself,” Gina admits, a few minutes later, “before the Ark came down.” Her words pierce and deflate the bubble of silence that has grown up around them, as the lantern light burns down, and the room dissolves into shadows cast by a burnt orange glow. She turns on her side and pitches her voice low, secret-deep and uneven, and pulls the blankets up to her chin. “I still lived with my parents. But singles are so hard to get. Then—they came down on Tesla.”

She breaks herself off with the tiniest intake of breath, and Raven breathes out a shaky, “Oh.” As if, somehow, she were surprised.

But loss, of course, is everywhere.

She reaches out to hold Gina’s hand in the dark.


	2. Maya: After 2x16 AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written January 8, 2019.
> 
> For the100--positivity's Ladies Appreciation Week Day Two: favorite female character (dead) + "if they survived" headcanon

Maya’s first breath of real air is cold and clear, not what she was expecting of the Earth at all. She thought the air aboveground would feel the way that paintings of wildflowers look: sweet and slight and lovely.

A breeze, brisk and unexpected, whisks past them and she shivers, pulls her arms close around herself, glances to her right and sees Jasper staring at her. His expression is vacant and unreadable. When she catches his gaze, he looks away.

Perhaps in this moment, she should feel guilty. She is, after all, the only survivor of the Mountain. Half an hour ago, when the full dread weight of that survival first fell upon her, she felt only a pure panic, a seizing of her muscles, a fire in her gut: the certainty with which she knew she did not want to live. Jasper had the syringe to the port on her chest before she could tell him no—she clawed at his arm and his chest and once, even, at his face, that determined, set expression on his face, like a stranger's—then it was done. She lay back against the concrete floor, breathing hard. Not quite crying. Listening, all around her, to the last few last straggling gasps of the dying.

But all that is over now. She feels no guilt and no regret, only a certain steely triumph. The others are gone and she lives. The others are belowground, and she is above. The Earth feels hard beneath her feet, almost frozen, not springy and soft like she thought it would be. No mud to sink her shoes in. The grass is prickly and dry beneath her palm, as she leans down, no one watching her now, to test out its texture, to search out dew. And the sky above her is clear and pale, bleached out almost white. She understands for the first time that a season is coming to its close.

Jasper’s people are preparing for the long walk back to their camp: tending to their wounded, distributing weapons. The Forty-Eight look tired and weirdly pale, and if they are pale, Maya thinks, she herself must be like a sheet, or a ghost. They press at cuts and bruises on their faces and arms and take extra sweaters and jackets when offered. She watches a man help Miller into one, a heavy black jacket like part of a soldier’s uniform; the man looks like a soldier himself, but hugs Miller like a father, and for a second something that is perhaps remorse pricks behind her eyes.

When the group starts moving, she falls toward the back, where no one can look at her, and sticks close to the survivors whom she knows. Jasper walks next to her but doesn’t speak. He’s holding a gun pointed down but his fingers too poised, too ready, and this makes him look younger than he did in the Mountain, and older, too, all at once.

The walk lasts for several hours, and very quickly, she becomes so tired that only stubbornness and pride keep her from asking for a break. Stubbornness and pride and a sliver of fear. She’s already crossed a distance greater than the whole bunker, and on uneven terrain, and through the cold, unforgiving aboveground air. Are the others fatigued? They do not show it. It’s hard to remember that Jasper and his friends only lived a month on the ground: they seem so familiar with it, unbothered by the upset of tiny stones beneath their feet, by the sharp bite of the wind, by the distracting height of the trees and their fluttering leaves.

Camp Jaha, when they arrive at last in the early hours of the afternoon, is not what she expected. Perhaps not what Jasper expected either: she feels how he tenses when they catch sight of the gate. Towering in the center of a little settlement, a bit of human disturbance in the overgrowth of nature all around, is a large, hulking shell of a ship, a ship that has crashed with blunt trauma into the Earth, a metallic arc of such unimaginable height and grandeur that when she sees it, Maya cannot decide if she is frightened or in awe. Perhaps both. She touches Jasper’s arm and he jumps. She imagines him firing the gun and she jumps.

The gate has been opened, and the others are filing slowly in. She sees now that they are tired indeed. They were tired all along. But she at last feels like she is catching her breath. The wind picks up again, and it blows away her old life, like maybe a part of her did die there, after all, and now she is being called to live again.


	3. Clarke & Raven: HS AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written January 9, 2019.
> 
> For the100--positivity's Ladies Appreciation Week Day Three: favorite female friendship + favorite au.
> 
> This story is part of the same universe as my fic "oh well, you've got me under your spell."

Raven comes over on the last day of summer vacation, before the start of tenth grade: a tradition of sorts. She and Clarke have hung out on every final summer day since the year before sixth grade, when they walked from Clarke’s house to the middle school and back, testing out the path, skirting along the edges of the sidewalks. This year, they’re more sedate. They sit out on Clarke’s back deck and drink the last of the lemonade from the fridge, kick their bare feet up on the table and talk about nothing.

Raven’s been away at camp most of the summer, and Clarke’s been traveling, off and on, so they haven’t seen each other much since school let out in May. This separation, in part, is to blame for the season zipping by with such speed, how Clarke cannot imagine, as she tips the lemonade bottle upside down and drips the last tangy drops into her glass, waking up tomorrow in the early gauzy hours of morning, pulling her backpack over her shoulder, letting her mother drop her off in the busy roundabout in front of the school. She misses the routine in a certain distant way. The last school year feels far away and yet the summer itself like only a second.

She’s already told Raven about the trip up to Maine, to visit her father’s family, and the not-quite-a-week that she and her parents spent in New York. Now Raven’s telling tales of wilderness camp: living in a log cabin, hiking in the woods, swimming in the lake. There’s something else there, too. Something unspoken in her stories, something that she can approach but not quite say. She’s telling Clarke about stargazing, sneaking out at night to lie in the grass and stare at the sky, and her face lights up with a thrilling excitement that Clarke can feel blooming, in sympathy, in her own chest. Raven lets her feet fall down onto the deck, leans forward in her chair, over the table. And seems about to say something more. Words like a confession on the tip of her tongue—and then she leans back, again, and picks up her almost-empty glass of lemonade and twirls it around and around.

“And I really think that astronaut might be a viable career path for me,” she finishes, instead, and Clarke, to give her privacy, ducks her head and grins.

She puts her feet down, too. Her flip flops are strewn off to the side, unpaired and faded in a crescent round the toes, and her bare feet soak up the warmth from the wooden deck, an almost burning heat, and she is glad.

“Probably,” she says. “But that’s not what you were going to say.”

Raven rolls her eyes, then takes a deep breath that does not quite merit a long exhale, a jumping, uncertain breath.

“Is this about a boy?” Clarke asks. “Was Finn at camp again?”

“No. And yes, but he's—we've—moved on.”

Clarke hums and nods, a slow and disbelieving, joking hum, and Raven kicks in her direction, under the table, and makes no contact.

Back to school tomorrow. Walking up the front steps, still wearing her summer clothes, her sneakers squeaking on the linoleum, which is polished for the start of the year. Finding her locker, her new classes. The clang of metal doors opening, closing, the thud of books set down, the ruffle of papers and the clean new pages of her notebooks, everything ready, everything new.

“You ready for tomorrow?” she asks, and Raven simply shrugs.


	4. Clarke: At the Summit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written January 10, 2019.
> 
> For the100--positivity's Ladies Appreciation Week Day Three: favorite female leader + canon compliant fic.
> 
> This is actually canon-divergent and in the same universe as a still-unpublished Bellarke fic I am writing.

This year’s Eastern Clans summit is being hosted by Trikru and held in the rebuilt TonDC. That is still how Clarke thinks of it: rebuilt. But really it has been forged again many times, and if it were destroyed again tomorrow, it would rise up once more after the settling of the dust. One thing about the Grounders is that they always rebuild. They are the direct descendants of the people who brought their homes and villages and even their cities back from the ultimate destruction and, even through the confusion of their difficult history, Clarke admires this stubborn perseverance in them.

But as Bellamy said once, they are Grounders too, in a way: just as persistent and as resilient. She does not mean to take credit, in thinking this, only to draw strength.

Dusk is starting to settle as Raven pulls the Rover up to the entrance to the village, and she and Clarke climb out. The rest of the delegations seem to have arrived already, and the streets are filled with a variety of differently dressed people, unusual people: long-absent acquaintances greeting each other, potential rivals sizing each other up. Clarke sizes all of them up.

“You do remember this is a peaceful summit, right?” Raven reminds her, as Clarke walks around the front of the Rover, hands on her hips and eyes narrow, scanning the crowd.

Of course she does. She knows the difference between peace and war. She remembers walking into TonDC for the first time, heavy coat, not her own, dragging at her shoulders, boots leaving deep marks in the mud, flexing her fingers in her gloves, preparing for battle. Back straight and body tense and ready and primed. The energy in her, around her, now is lighter, taut but without that old undertone of fear, bright instead with a higher and almost delightful excitement, a pleasant thrill.

“I remember,” she answers, “that last year Broadleaf tried to get out of every single trade agreement they’ve signed in the last decade, and if they try to pull that with us again—”

“You’ll knife them?” Raven jokes.

The corner of Clarke’s mouth quirks up.

TonDC is not like Arkadia. It’s not that their home is dull, or quiet—the difference is not as stark as that—but the hum there is of building, expansion, a sweet, organic growth. TonDC during a summit is a mash of rivalry and jealousy and greed and want and potential sneaking treachery, and then, above it all, a certain hope, a hope that everyone will leave at the end, somehow, satisfied and content—if she solves the puzzle right, she’ll get ahead, without dragging anyone else down.

And if that doesn’t work, she’ll borrow Raven’s blade.

“Depends,” she answers, “you have something on you?”

“Clarke.” Raven shoots her the most innocent of looks. “Come on. Of course I don’t. I know the rules.”

Clarke keeps a straight face for all of ten seconds, then lets it break. “Come on,” she laughs, and reaches for Raven’s arm. “Let’s tell the others we’re here.”


	5. Anya: Pre-Canon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written January 11, 2019.
> 
> For the100--positivity's Ladies Appreciation Week Day Five: favorite female warrior + pre-canon headcanon.

Anya does not believe that there are people living in the sky.

She’s heard the rumors. The first time, the story shared over the flickering flames of a campfire late at night, after a long day of training, when she and the other new recruits should have been asleep, she thought it was no more than a ghost tale, and dismissed it out of hand as utterly irrelevant. Before Praimfaya, the story went, people knew how to travel to space. Some of them were living there when the planet burned. Some of them are living there now.

How incredibly unlikely, she thought, and how boring, too. Maybe there were people there once, but that was years ago. Surely, by now, they’re dead and gone.

Lincoln was sitting next to her that night and she could hear, even over the crackling and snapping of the fire, his intake of breath as the story began. He believed. He’s always believed, and in the wrong sort of things: distant uncertainties, fairy tales, rumors. He’s strong and he’s smart and he’s fast, but he’ll never get anywhere, Anya thinks, with his head in the clouds.

She, herself, is planted firmly in the earth. She has goals. She has a plan. And slowly, slowly, she cuts everything else away.

Once, not long after she began her warrior training, she slipped away from the group and wandered off into the woods, all alone. She knew that this was against the rules, but she had her bow and arrow and her knife, and a second knife, also against the rules, tucked into a hidden pocket in her boot, so she wasn’t afraid. Already she was one of the best fighters, not because, her teacher told her, she was especially strong or especially fast, but because she was driven. _So determined,_ he told her, _that even if Death should one day defeat and take you, you would stand right up again and keep on fighting, undeterred._

The words were a drumbeat in her head. She heard them with every crunch of her boots over the leaves.

Most of the others were glad to be chosen to train at all, but Anya wanted to lead an army. Many armies. A village. She wanted to rise as high as a red-blooded warrior could.

Earlier, sparring with Tristan, he’d backed her up against a tree trunk with a knife to her throat, and almost broke her. When she thought of this moment, she jumped up on a fallen tree as if it were his throat beneath her heel, then down onto the ground again, and snarled to herself, low and angry and cruel.

_Someday I will lead him into battle. He will kneel at my feet._

As she planned out her triumphs and witnessed her own future success, she wandered farther and farther from the training camp, until finally she found a little village, a small cluster of houses overrun by the wilderness, a small cluster of houses she found only once and never again. They were made of wood and rotting. Inside, the furniture was covered with dust, and in the kitchen, food of a sort she’d never seen before was sitting out, covered in mold.

She stood at the kitchen sink and turned the faucets on and off, listening to the whining screech of metal, searching out water that would never come, then looked out the window at the tiny little yard and the rotting brown fence. What an odd little house. But people lived in it once, real people, who faced the end of their whole world and probably died, and for the first time in her life she felt sympathy for the dead, instead of simple disdain. A slight well of sadness rose in her, sweet and sickly like the perfume of flowers in the heavy, wet days of late spring.

In that moment, she remembered not only the old people on Earth, but the old people of the sky. She looked through the window and then up, searching out the sky through the trees, catching only glimpses, and wondering, through the tiniest of cracks in her heart, how far up one would have to fly to make a home in the blackness that comes after the blue? And what it would be like, she wondered, to throw off the gravity of the earth, the worries of the earth, to leave the race entirely, just to be?

Though she was gone almost two hours, the training camp was so busy, so riotous, such an utter mess, that no one but Lincoln even noticed she was gone. He told her that it was their secret. Anya, beholden to no one, barely uttered a reply.

Later, she let him have the scouting missions he wanted, not because he held that moment of vulnerability over her, but because she knew that otherwise, he would simply wander off without permission, and maybe find the village, and maybe never return.

He’s with her in TonDC when, in bright hours of the early afternoon, the clear sky is shaken by a fabulous thunder, and a large silver rocket plummets to the ground. She can hear Lincoln’s quiet intake of breath. She can feel something in herself, desire or regret or want, or something more unnameable still, squeezing in her chest, gripping at her heart.


	6. Gina: Visiting the Mountain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written January 12, 2019.
> 
> For the100--positivity's Ladies Appreciation Week Day Six: Most underrated female character + missing scene.

Gina is not privy to the discussions about Mount Weather, except for the last one, which she overhears because it takes place between Chancellor Griffin and Lincoln, while the first exploratory party double checks their supplies at the gates. He doesn’t want them to go. But the Mountain, Chancellor Griffin replies, is full of supplies that they need, food that they need, and it’s sitting there empty and unguarded. They hardly have a choice.

Not empty, Lincoln reminds her, while Gina adjusts the straps on her backpack. She is facing away from them, pretending she doesn’t hear.

A chill passes through her, and she wonders if he’s talking about the bodies.

The team is led by Chief Engineer Sinclair. Only one of its members, Police Chief Miller, has been to the Mountain before. It would make sense, she knows, in a hard-hearted and emotionless and straightforward way, to take some of the survivors with them, to lead the way through the tunnels, to act as guides. But no one who has seen the survivors could ever ask them to go. So they’ll just have to manage by themselves, brave explorers in the dark.

The hike is exhausting and exhilarating both, a wonder to be walking on the Earth at last, and not fenced in, and not shadowed by the hulking Alpha Station arch always behind her. For the first time since they landed, she feels that she is learning the real rays of the sun. The others get tired, and the conversation, which kept the group cheery when they first set out, starts to falter and then falls into a lull, replaced by uneven, labored breaths, but Gina can barely feel the weight on her back or the low, building ache in her legs. She feels only her lungs and the warmth of the air, and neither is a burden.

As they walk, and with nothing but the crunch of their boots to distract her, she thinks about Bellamy, who asked to go on this expedition, even though his eyes have a hollowed out and bruised look, even though his gaze is always jumping and flickering, despite himself. Bellamy is gentle and kind when he speaks to her. His voice is low, and when they talk, out by the firepit or in the tiny little commons in the East Wing, in the evenings after dinner, he is so quiet that he makes small talk sound like secrets. This is one of her favorite things about him. They talk about the plans to open up the hangar deck and to build a wall around the camp; they marvel over the weather; they tell each other stories that aren’t true.

He was in the Mountain, but he never talks about that.

He wanted to come on this mission and she heard him talking about it, once, to Marcus Kane, just a few words as she passed them in the crowded hallway, but she’s not surprised that Kane and the Chancellor said no. If he were here, he would be solemn and gloomy, and everyone would be staring at him.

When they reach the Mountain, they find the large, round, iron door standing open, like the entrance to a crypt. The inside beckons, eerie and silent. At first, no one wants to enter, or even to speak. Gina thinks about Lincoln’s words again ( _not empty_ ) and then she imagines someone, a survivor, finding Mecha sitting abandoned and stripped on the edge of the lake, and for the first time she thinks about the people of the Mountain and feels sad.

Inside, the bunker is cool, but not cold, grey and industrial like the Ark itself, and then, slowly unfolding its secrets, wide and bright and full of beauty, artifacts, history. She finds herself alone in a wide, white hallway, and she decides that she will come here again and again. Every supply run, every excavation.

Just trying to be useful. Busy little worker bee.

She keeps waiting and waiting for the horrid revelation of the dead, but of course they have already been buried. The survivors returned them to the earth before they even began their own march home. When Lincoln said the Mountain wasn’t empty, he was referring to their ghosts.


	7. Kane/Abby: Blunt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written February 2, 2019.

When Marcus sees Abby’s name on the candidate list for the open Council seat, he smiles, the sort of patronizing half-smile she’d hate if she could see. Abby Griffin on the Council. He doesn’t see that happening. Not that it would hurt him if it did: he’s not up for re-election himself, and as the Vice-Chancellor, he has a bit more power than any freshman member could hope for, old childhood friend or no. But still. It’s a distant hypothetical anyway.

Abby Griffin.

He smiles again, then shakes his head and bites down hard on the corner of his lip.

The problem isn’t that she’s incapable, because he knows that she’s smart and she’s tough, not the type to be swallowed up by Ark politics, like he’s seen happen to ambitious candidates before. It’s that she’s… blunt. Too blunt. Incurably stubborn. And not one to play by the rules. A potentially toxic, potentially dangerous combination of traits.

He knows she’s one to speak, precisely and unhesitatingly, whatever is on her mind, because they were in school together all through their adolescence and once, when he was seventeen and she was sixteen, he worked up the courage to ask her out on a date. And in turn, she gave him a shocked and wide-eyed look, as if briefly scandalized, and then said, “No, I don’t think that will work,” just like that. It had been a bit of a blow. Nothing that matters now: it’s been over fifteen years. She’s married, and Marcus himself came to her wedding. What stings in retrospect is not the rejection but the sense, afterward, that he should have seen it coming, not just the no but the manner in which it was given: simple and without regret or apology, exactly what he would have said himself, if he were her.

He tries to picture her now in the Council chambers, sitting across from him, unreadable. Even after all these years, she is so often unreadable to him. She will sit with her hands folded on top of the table, leaning toward each speaker in turn, forming her opinions so inscrutably and so precisely that when she speaks at last, he will think, _oh of course, the Abby I’ve known so long_ —but in the moment before, he would be as helpless as a blind man trying to read her face.

This is the sense in which Abby Mayfield has never let him go.

How she so frustrates him, almost infuriates him sometimes, how he can never bring himself to feel anything but respect for _no, I don’t think that will work_ , and every other impasse they have reached between them since.

He glances down the rest of the candidate list. 

She is the best choice, without doubt. But with her sharp, persistent, obstinance, her compulsive candid nature—a bluntness that is not honesty, that is not beyond the ability to obscure or even to deceive—no. He just can’t see her making it to that empty seat in the Council room.


	8. Octavia: Mountains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written February 10, 2019.

From her seat behind the pilot, in the tiny ten-person plane with all of her most important worldly possessions stuffed in beneath its nose, Octavia stares out at the mountains. They are tall and sharp, not as steep as those out west but more imposing than the old, rounded hills of her youth, and covered in swaths of evergreen trees and snow. Colors look different here. The snow more pristine, the pines a deeper shade than any other winter trees she’s ever known, the sky a sharply beautiful gray. The landscape seems uninterrupted and eternal, as if her old life were as distant as a foreign world, one that she left with a single sharp ascent into the clouds and to which she may never return.

When the plane lands she will breathe deeply of a new start.

Maybe the last one she’ll need for a while. Maybe a success, unlike college. She tried that for almost two years, then dropped out. Unlike moving in with Lincoln, whom she loved because she thought they were the same: free and wild and fond of sleeping out of doors. He taught her martial arts, then didn’t understand why she wanted to fight. He took her camping, but never seemed sorry when they packed up their sleeping bags and tents and went back home. Maybe he was too content with life, past his rough and untamed days, settling into pacifism and sedate, gentle peace. Maybe that was the problem, the most vital way in which they did not fit. Since she’s still searching.

She tried moving back in with her brother. Big mistake. Living under the same roof brought back their co-dependencies; she started sleepwalking again, waking up in the morning wondering if she’d tried to strangle him in his sleep. She never loved Lincoln as fiercely, which may have been another one of their problems, and she’s never hated herself as much as when she stopped remembering her own age, because her big brother was there across the breakfast table and there before she went to sleep, and soon she was too tangled in knots, and from that point what could she do but pack her bags?

The mountains. The pure, sharp air of the north. The snow. The plane lurches lower, a descent she can feel in her gut, and she sees now the distant tops of every tree. Maybe if impulses like these—raze the ground, start again—came at the proper sort of times, she would arrive in summer and live under the stars, but that is not to be. For a few weeks, she’ll be crashing at Niylah’s place, which she understands is isolated, with icicles hanging from the eaves in the morning and frost on the glass, and if they don’t love each other anymore by the time the snow melts, well, at least she knows the mountains themselves will take her, then.

The mountains above, the trees above, and the sky, and below the solid, reliable dirt.


	9. Raven/Octavia: Tart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written February 10, 2019.

On her way back from the gym, Raven stops by the coffee place with the good smoothies, thinking perhaps she’ll pick up a muffin, too, if they have anything good. Her hair’s still a little wet from her post-workout shower. It hangs loose over her shoulders, and she can feel her t-shirt, something old and dingy from the back of her closet, barely any nicer than her workout clothes, dampening against her back. Her gym bag, uncomfortably heavy, is starting to weigh down her shoulder. But she’s riding a high of endorphins, the decline of a hard-earned burn through her arms and stomach and legs, and it’s a bright Saturday morning and she feels buoyant. It is a buoyant sort of day.

The bell above the door rings as she steps inside.

She slips in at the end of the line to the register, which is longer than she would have liked, and moving slowly enough to allow her to ogle the pastries and deserts beneath the display case glass. Not just muffins, but scones, and breads, and whole fruit pies, various tempting foods she should not even consider and yet—

“Tart?”

She looks up, her eyes narrowing.

_What did you call me, bitch?_

A girl is standing on the other side of the display, behind the counter, staring at her. Her hair is longer than Raven’s and falls straight to either side of her face, and a hint of a tattoo peaks out from the edge of her t-shirt sleeve. She’s smiling a bright and innocent smile, which does not hide at all the sly and knowing look about her eyes.

Raven hikes her bag higher up on her shoulder, and stares back.

“Are you interested in the tart?” the girl asks, pointing to a small tray of little, square pastry deserts, topped with fruit. “They’re strawberry.”

“Oh.”

The girl smiles and sticks her hands in her apron pockets. She looks pleased, more than embarrassed. Octavia, her nametag says, and oddly, it fits.

Raven’s almost to the head of the line now, and she has no idea what flavors of muffins are out today, if they have the java chip ones she likes so much, because all she can think about it is Octavia’s bright voice saying, “Tart?” and the sharp, deep red of the strawberries, and how when—if—she bites into them, she will be thinking of Octavia, associating taste and sweet, imagined taste.

“Sure,” she says, and pulls out her wallet from the pocket of her jeans. “I’ll take one.”

“Full disclosure,” Octavia says, as she hands Raven a brown paper bag, and her smoothie, a thick green liquid in a tall, plastic cup. “I made the tart. And,” she leans forward, a conspiratorial whisper, “I’m new.”

Raven just grins. “In that case,” she answers, “I’ll have to come back later. Give you my critique.”

“Oh, I hope you do.” She slides the register closed with a high ding and final click. “I hope I’ll be seeing you again.”


	10. Miller/Jackson: Agility

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written February 20, 2019.

Miller would like to observe Jackson at work, but that would require descending again into Mount Weather, and that seems too much like returning to the scene of the crime. Is he the criminal or the victim in this scenario? Neither seems exactly right but he won’t agonize over the distinction. The Mountain is the past and it won’t haunt him, because he does not let it, because he has completely let it go.

“Let me ask you this,” Jackson says, when he tries to explain, and shifts a little closer, not quite pushing Miller back against the sheets. Jackson is lithe and quick, more agile than Miller had expected, and his movements are always unpredictable. Darting movements to keep him guessing. He raises his eyebrows.

_Go on._

“Does this arm work like it used to?”

He presses a kiss to Miller’s shoulder, and lightly trails his fingertips down over his bicep, a touch so slow Miller can only read appreciation in it. This thought distracts him, for a moment, from the pointed dare of the words.

“Yeah,” he answers, at last. He grabs Jackson’s hand, quick, and pulls him closer so that they are nose to nose. Trying to look into his eyes, he becomes cross-eyed. “Just like new.”

“So.”

Jackson is settling on top of him now, hand still gripping his hand, harder now than a moment before.

“So?”

“That’s Mount Weather’s work. That’s their equipment. That’s their tech.”

_That’s their skill, and they’re all dead now._

His shoulder doesn’t hurt, not even when it rains, not even when he’s tired, not even on those rare occasions when he remembers the old wound. It has healed completely, left barely even a scar. Maybe he should be impressed. Jackson was, when Miller mentioned it once, little more than a passing remark at the time even though he should have known that Jackson and his doctor’s fingers, his doctor’s mind, would want to examine the stretch of skin, probe at muscle and sinew and bone. He felt a bit like a specimen, but also so fully the object of Jackson’s gaze that a bit of heat burned in him, too, at the touch, deep down and low, like a fire in the late night after all other fires have gone out.

“That’s why you have to go,” Miller answers, letting go of his hand at last. “And I get that, and I’m not trying to stop you. Nothing to do with why I’m staying in Arkadia.”

Jackson rolls back onto his side and props himself up on one elbow. “All right,” he concedes.

"Not going to fight me on it?”

He shrugs.

“I thought you’d be against the project altogether. I think most of the forty-eight are.”

Miller shakes his head. “I’m not trying to stop you or Abby. Next time I get shot, I’d rather end up in the hospital in Mount Weather than some… glorified field tent. But—I’m telling you that the shoulder didn’t heal like you think it did. That’s all.”

The shoulder, or some other part of him, less easy to define.

Jackson stares at him a long moment, serious, and inexplicably soft, like maybe he understands after all.

But all he asks is, “Are you planning on getting shot again?” and Miller shrugs, a half-smile at the corner of his mouth and says:

“No. But you never know what will happen out here.”


	11. Lincoln/Octavia: Poetry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written February 23, 2019.

Lincoln picks her up for their first date on his motorcycle, and Octavia’s first thought is _fuck, my brother would kill him if he knew_. But that doesn’t stop the thrill of excitement she feels, or make her any less eager to swing her leg over the back of the beast, secure her arms around Lincoln’s waist, and just go. Such unbearable intimacy, with someone she barely knows. Then the loud growl of the engine starting up, thrumming beneath her, the swerve of her whole world as they take the first turn.

She knew about the motorcycle when she asked him out, and also about his tattoos, one on his arm, one peeking out above the neckline of his t-shirt, and one, he tells her, across his back. She knew he worked part time as security at the shitty little downtown music venue where they met, and she’d guessed, from conversation, that he was also in school, just like her.

She did not know that he liked to sketch, or that he tried his hand at poetry sometimes—not until later, when she’s walking barefoot in her old jeans with the holes in the knees and one of his t-shirts, much too big and falling off her shoulder, across the wood floor of his apartment, and she finds the sketchbook on his coffee table, next to a smaller notebook, which is tied closed with twine. The notebook intrigues her more. But though she’s not above snooping (already took in the medicine cabinet, stocked with herbal remedies and vitamins, and the kitchen cupboards, full of mismatched plates and bowls and several hand-thrown ceramic mugs), she doesn’t open either. Something about the twine, perhaps, makes her stop, after she’s already perched carefully on the edge of the couch and started to reach out her hand. The couch is overstuffed and upholstered in a deep red corduroy. She sets her hands down on her knees. At the other end of the apartment, the shower is running, and when she closes her eyes, she pictures Lincoln underneath the spray, soaping himself up like some sort of ad for manly-scented fresh-mountain-breeze body wash. It makes her smile.

While she waits for him, she returns to the kitchen to brew them both coffee. The smell reminds her of early mornings and high beams of sun, and quiet, and peace.

She finds that it’s easier to get him to talk about the sketchbook, which he spreads out for her later, over the kitchen table, and which is filled with gentle pencil and charcoal drawings of trees, rivers, animals, a few people here and there. She suggests that he draw her sometime, as she slides her foot over his, and takes a sip of coffee from one of his handmade mugs. Such peace in this room. She’s thinking she could stay here forever, as Lincoln lifts his head to look at her, half-smile on his face, half-hidden by his hand. If she didn’t know better, she’d say that look, that smile, not tinted by shyness but by a soft admiration, and low-floating happiness, might be love. Or at least its beginning.

The little notebook he does not open, though he eventually admits that it is filled with scraps of writings, poetry, some prose. She asks if she can read it. He tells her that it’s harder to share than the sketches, that it sits too close to the heart, and she twines their fingers together and reminds herself: this is only the beginning, she is still alight in the middle of the unknown.


	12. Jasper/Raven: Nebulous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written February 26, 2019.

Raven needs her cane to walk, but at least, with that help, she can manage. After a night of interrupted sleep, she has the urge to wander.

The ship feels abandoned in the pre-dawn, especially in those places where the impact of the crash sent the roof caving in, where plants have started to curl in along the broken edges, where she can look up and see, through the breaks in jagged metal, hints of sky. Night has started to fade but not yet into morning, so the sky is neither black nor blue, neither starry nor sunny, but a nebulous, colorless expanse of slow-expanding light.

From the doorway to Alpha Station, she can see the full expanse. The first hints of sun, burning through clouds.

Her leg hurts, from the sight of the drill wound all the way down, a pain that mingles with the distant, numb aching to which she had almost, before this setback, become accustomed. She leans heavily on her cane as she takes another step down and into the dirt. For a while now, the days have been overcast, threatening rain, or maybe snow, though nothing has fallen. The air has a thin, bleak feel to it, tinged with a sharp and unaccountable cold.

Jasper is sitting by the fire pit. She notices him almost immediately, hunched up over himself, wearing the jacket he hunted up from the Mecha Station stores last week and hasn’t taken it off since. Underneath it, a thin blue sweater, with holes worried into the ends of the sleeves for his thumbs to poke through when he pulls them down over his hands. The fire pit’s long gone cold, and he looks like he’s holding back shivers.

“Hey,” she greets him, more softly than she’d intended, limping over and waiting for him to look up. He does, a bit delayed. His eyes are distant, and she’s not sure he’s seeing her, or what he understands of what he sees. In her less charitable moments, she hates him. She hates his silences, hates his newfound taste for getting drunk in the middle of the day, hates the horrid, rotting aura of mourning, worn too long and starting to decay, that follows him wherever he goes. She hates how he does nothing, because the only thing that keeps her sane is being useful—sorting out scrap metal in her hospital bed—and if she lost the ability to do even that, she has to wonder, is Jasper the sort of wraith that she’ll become?

She hates him, too, for pushing everyone away. Still, when she sits down, awkward and only with his help, on the low log by the gutted-out fire, he accepts her presence as if they were still friends. As if they had not, in some halting way, become something else.

“Hey,” he answers. Spares her a glance and a half shrug, pulling his jacket closer across his shoulders. It’s hard to tell but she thinks he’s gotten thinner. When she reaches out and pushes his overgrown hair from his face, the hollows beneath his eyes look deeper, the set of his cheekbones more pronounced. A skeleton face that the hair hides well.

“You should cut this,” she says, anyway. “It’s getting so long.”

Her fingers slip through the strands, a lingering touch over the shell of his ear.

“I should buzz it all off,” Jasper answers. Raven’s not sure if he’s joking.

“Maybe. Might suit you.”

He manages a half-smile at that—a joke, after all, perhaps—and then wraps his arm around her, so she’s so close she can hear the deep sigh under his breath, the slight hum of sound there, feel the way his body falls down and in upon itself. Why does he approximate such intimacy with her, she wonders, and no one else? Because she was in the Mountain, too, but only for a time? Because he thinks she understands him, her pain stemming and expanding out from the same source? Because she was not a prisoner with him, does not remind him of the weeks trapped there, the way Monty does? Simply because she is around?

And why is she around?

Because—the wall around the perimeter, the cane she’s left on the ground, the threatening rain—she has nowhere else to go?

She turns her head to the side, nose crushed against his jacket, and closes her eyes.


	13. Bellamy/Clarke: Warmth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written March 11, 2019, for pawprinterfanfic on tumblr.

Clarke is not widely known for her warmth, but Bellamy’s seen sides of her that no one else has. Like now, leaning back against the side of Alpha Station in the half-light at the end of the day, arms crossed against her chest, looking out toward the gate as if it were the horizon. They’re calling her Wanheda and he thinks she’s started to believe it. Her hair has grown ratty at the ends and is stained a once-deep red, now faded pink.

He thinks her idea of a disguise is almost funny, but not in the sort of way that makes him want to laugh.

They’ve been standing outside so long that his legs have become, if not tired, rather restless, but instead of walking around to regain feeling in them, he bends down into a squat like he’s about to examine the dirt. Above him, Clarke sighs and lets her arms fall to her sides. He can’t see her face but he knows that her expression is softening.

Has she come to see herself like the Grounders do, half-mythical creature risen up out of the mythical Mountain, a hellfire creature, a portent of death? Ever since she came back, he’s been wondering, because she doesn’t seem like the Clarke he thought he knew. So much colder, and hollow. Maybe in the sense of being fragile.

He pulls himself back up to his feet and then stretches his arms up above his head, yawning.

“You tired?” Clarke asks, wry, out of the corner of her mouth.

“No.” He knows she’s not up for sleeping, or even lying in bed, though who knows where she’s been sleeping and the beds on Alpha, he must say, are rather nice. “I thought you said you wanted to take a walk.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Changed my mind, maybe.”

She’s been back four days, and he’s not sure she’s gotten even one good night’s sleep. Her mother’s set her up in a room near medical, a quiet little corner of the ship just for her, and every night Bellamy walks her back to that room and, after the door closes, leans his forehead against it wondering if he just imagined the way she hesitated, like she wanted to invite him inside. There is no question of whether or not he forgives her for leaving, not because he does or he doesn’t, not because it is obvious, but because he simply is not thinking of problems like that. She’s here and when he looks at her face, he imagines her hiding in the woods, scurrying in the animal dark, hearing rumors of the bounty on her head, trying not to be found.

Except for their nights, they’ve spent most of their time together, not speaking much, and he wonders if she is delaying going back to her room because she does not want to leave him. Or the other way around.

He’s seen her bedside manner, first and most hauntingly in the moment of Atom’s death, so he knows that Clarke can be soft, can be kind even when kindness requires a certain cruelty, can be strong and loving and unafraid all at once. That’s the order of the new world, he’d thought, at the time. And he knew then that she’d rise to the top of it.

He sees her hands now, cracked and reddened from winter and the outdoor air, and remembers them stroking through Atom’s hair. Remembers them blood stained from dropship surgeries. Remembers how once by the campfire at the old camp, she sat next to him and let one of those hands rest on his knee, the whole night. Small moments when he thought he could see the future of them, growing like the infinite blades of grass on the ground.

Sitting by the fire those nights, listening to the crack and spit of it, watching the flames and the tiny branches burning up into ash and smoke, and feeling the hazy warmth of it reaching out through the dark to them, he’d felt like this thing they were fighting for wasn’t so much survival but _home_.

“So you just want to stand here?” he says, aloud. The half-light is dipping into no-light. After dark, the season feels like winter, though sometimes during the day he can almost smell spring coming in on the wind.

“Or we could break out of Arkadia,” Clarke suggests. He has to look at her face to see if she’s joking, but it’s hard to make out her features, and he still can’t tell. But it must be a joke. He quirks the corner of his mouth up.

“I don’t want to go foraging for berries in the woods,” he answers. A dumbass answer: he doesn’t want to sleep on the ground or freeze among the leaves or lose sight of her again, with her darkened hair, her camouflage, but he does want to get out of the looming shadow of her home station, the dark wheel of the arch, never spinning. He wants to huddle up around her, hold her, fall asleep with his nose in her hair. If she told him that were only possible if they threw the rest away, he’d toss it: the Guard jacket he’s been given, the gun he’s allowed to carry, the soft and sorry looks that people who don’t know him always give.

Sometimes he is angry that she left, because he wanted to leave too, but he didn’t.

Did she come back for him? Are they both stuck now?

Clarke has edged a little closer, her arm pressed against his arm. He tells himself that this next gesture, how he wraps his arm around her shoulders, lets her tuck her head in under his chin, is just to keep her warm, safe from the night chill. But really it’s just to keep her _safe_. Another moment no one else sees: Clarke, requesting safety, curling her arm around him, sticking her hand in his jacket pocket. When he holds her, she does not seem like the Commander of Death, like a spirit or a demon or a creature. She feels soft and vulnerable and human. Just human, seeking out comfort and kindness, and at least he does not find this hard to give. 


	14. Bellamy/Clarke: Protests

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written March 13, 2019, for anonymous, who requested a scene from the _Anchored in the Ground_ universe in which Bellamy tells Clarke he's running for Chancellor.

Clarke has not yet found a way to exist in her childhood bedroom without feeling too old, too large, too intrusive: a trespasser through her own now-shaky memories. Not that she can complain. The housing shortage in Arkadia is severe, though even those with proper rooms have long become fed up with life on their grounded ship. 

She can hear them now, as she sits on her bed, leaning back against the headboard with her tablet in her lap, unable to concentrate on her reading; she can hear them, protesting outside. The old Griffin quarters are in the center of the ship, no windows in the walls, but the rhythm of incoherent chants still reaches her, faint like the rattling of distant ghosts. She’s much too far away to hear what they’re saying, but she was outside earlier, so she knows. _Bring down the wall!_ one group of them is shouting. _New land new homes!_

There’s another group, too, almost as large, countering with their own slogans. _Unfair and unsafe! The Grounders’ Chancellor runs Arkadia!_

She’s been staring at the same sentence for ten minutes, picturing them on opposite sides of the main fire pit, flanked by falling metal outbuildings and, in the near distance, the Arkadian wall.

Bellamy is pacing the room in semi-circles, all the way to one side of the bed, then all the way to the other. He’s staring at the floor, his own feet, but maybe he can tell that Clarke has lifted her head to watch him, because he does not seem surprised when she asks:

“Do you want to go out there?”

His head jerks up and he stops abruptly at the foot of the bed.

“And join the protest full of people who want to take down Kane?”

He sounds incredulous, but only faintly so; they both know the situation is more complicated than that. Clarke sets her tablet aside and crawls down to the edge of the bed, in front of him, settles there with her legs tucked under her and pulls at his arms until he gives her his hands.

“They don’t all want to take down Kane,” she answers, which is true but not the point, and Bellamy almost pulls away from her in frustration. She yanks him forward again and won’t speak until she meets his eye. “Hey—hey, listen. You’re allowed to tell me what you really believe.”

“I haven’t been lying to you—”

“I know. I’m not saying… Bellamy.” She lets out a hard breath through her nose, shakes her head, and tries again, her fingers digging into his skin. “My allegiance isn’t to Kane. It’s not to my mother. It’s not to the office of the Chancellor. It’s to you and to Arkadia.”

_In that order._

His hands are twisting around in hers now, palms pressing against palms and fingers twining together. She knows that he feels safer, just as she does, whenever they are linked.

But he still doesn’t speak, so she says what she had almost said before: “I know you’re the one who carved ‘Free Elections Free Arkadia’ into the side of the station.”

Bellamy’s eyes flutter briefly closed, and if he almost smiles, it is a wry, a self-loathing sort of smile. “Not one of my finer moments,” he admits, low. “I was just…frustrated—”

“It was smart.”

He shakes his head, a brief jerk, his eyes still closed. “It was like throwing a match in a powder keg.”

“Maybe that’s what we need—”

“It’s not exactly _productive_ , Clarke—”

“Then what would be?”

She’s all the way up on her knees now, nose to nose with him, and he’s opened his eyes again and is staring at her, taking in the excitement of her expression, listening still to the faint noises of near-riot in the yard outside.

“They want two opposite things,” he says, slowly. “For the wall to come down so we can expand and build new houses, and for the wall to stay up to protect us from the Grounders. But they also want the same thing. To feel like they’re on the Earth instead of in the Ark.”

He doesn’t say the rest, so Clarke fills it in. “And Kane can’t give them that because he lacks legitimacy. He’s trying, but he has no more capital left. Neither he nor my mom. Neither was ever elected Chancellor.”

Bellamy grimaces, and Clarke watches him swallow, hard. “The last elected Chancellor was assassinated,” he points out.

Not a great memory, but Clarke shoves her way through it. “But you still defaced the ship. Made it a sort of… a monument, to the idea that elections could work because… what other option do we have?” At the end, her voice sounds almost like a plea.

“What we need,” Bellamy answers, gaining confidence now, “is someone the people trust. Someone they will want to choose. Someone who can bring about a tangible truce with the Grounders, and improve everyday life here in Arkadia. Make it… a proper village. With cabins to live in. Expanded farming.”

“The negotiations with the Grounders really are going better than people think,” Clarke reminds him. She would know: she’s been staring at her notes on their last meeting with the clan leaders for about an hour now. “They just don’t want to believe. Some of them.”

“Because they’re scared and the Grounders are an easy scapegoat,” Bellamy finishes. “I know.”

He sighs, and lets go of Clarke’s hands just to sit down next to her on the bed. She sits back down on her ankles, then twists her legs out from under her, and gently tucks herself in against Bellamy’s side. He wraps his arm around her, a well-worn instinct.

“If I told you that I think I could be that person,” he says, after a long silence, “would you tell me I’m losing my mind?”

Clarke reaches up and swipes a loose curl from his forehead, then lets her hand flutter down, gently settles her palm at his cheek. She tilts her face up to him, and he looks back at her. “I think,” she answers, “that I’d cut the line just to be the first to vote for you, future Chancellor Blake.”


	15. Bellamy/Jasper: Hickory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written March 16, 2019.

Bellamy seems like the sort of guy who makes wooden furniture by hand in his spare time. Maybe this is because he’s always wearing button-down plaid shirts, or because his hands are so large, and give the appearance of great strength and skill. He seems like he spends his vacation time out camping in the woods. Jasper imagines him collecting wood for a fire, stomping through clearings in hiking boots with thick soles.

Jasper himself has only been camping once, in high school, with Monty. He doesn’t remember much of the experience, except that he’d gotten tangled up in some intense, but not altogether unpleasant, hallucinations, and that he’d stayed up half the night wondering how nature could be so very loud. He doesn’t truly desire to go camping again, but something in the same family as desire does curl up in his stomach when Bellamy pushes his sleeves up to his elbows with such definite, settled energy. If Bellamy asked him, he definitely would.

Jasper’s boss is not an appropriate target for his fantasies, and he knows this, but Bellamy is handsome and quiet and inscrutable, so it’s easy to imagine all sorts of hidden lives for him, easy to let his mind wander as Bellamy helps him to clean up the kitchen at the end of the day. Which is another thing about him that keeps Jasper’s brain whirring sometimes late at night: how unexpectedly kind he is, how honestly hard-working. He’s gruff and hard to read and yet there’s no pretense to him, as if, were Jasper to tell him he’s inscrutable, he would be honestly surprised.

So what if Bellamy were to take him camping. Jasper would struggle to set up the tent, much more sure of his abilities than he has any right to be—or maybe he’d figure it out right away, because he’s pretty clever, and most tasks, even new ones, do not elude him for long—while Bellamy concerned himself with the fire. Or helped him with the tent. Later, they’d roast marshmallows on sticks over the crackling flames, above them a canopy of branches and leaves giving way at last to the depths of the sky, a multitude of stars that can’t be seen from the city even on nights that feel clear. Bellamy probably knows tons about stars, about all the constellations and their stories. He likes to drop random historical facts into conversation sometimes, and somehow in Jasper’s mind this fits well with an interest in astronomy—or maybe he just likes the romance of it, knee bumping against knee while Bellamy points out the patterns in the distance points of light.

They’d roll out their sleeping bags in the tent, and in the small, quiet space, all those night nature noises surrounding them, the clicks and rustlings of insects, the hooting of owls, the wind in the trees, they’d be alone, and close enough for Jasper to read the patterns in the freckles on Bellamy’s face. Faint constellations there, for him to become expert in.

A silly idea.

“You’re awfully quiet today,” Bellamy says, as he finishes wiping the countertop down.

Jasper startles, almost dropping the coffee mug he’d been putting away. The last one. “So are you,” he answers.

Bellamy laughs, low. “Yeah, but it’s unusual for you.”


	16. Clarke/Raven: Believer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written March 24, 2019.

Clarke is not a believer, which suits Raven fine. She never spent much time at the living tree herself, while on the Ark, could never see anything to it except how small it was, how insignificant compared to the endlessness of the stars, and space. Now that she’s on Earth it is the stars she misses, more than she could be said to have missed the forests while above—in that way that people pretend to miss what they have never known—and she survives this new grounded existence with a narrow focus on her work, on being practical and useful, day to day.

She has not explained this in any detail to Clarke, afraid perhaps that something of her true priorities will seep through, and with it her true weakness. The corruptibility of all people is what Clarke believes in, at her core. The bendability of all people toward her goals. Knowing this about her means that Raven will never fully be able to trust her, or trust herself around her, that there will always be a narrow band of darkness between them, even when she sits on the windowsill in Clarke’s bedroom and Clarke stands between her legs, and they watch each other’s fingers tracing patterns against each other’s hands. Raven glances sometimes at Clarke’s eyes, trying to guess what she is thinking. Her gaze is distant. Her hair hangs too long, uneven at the ends, on either side of her face.

Raven lets go of her hand to tuck a few strands behind her ear, and in that movement, convinces Clarke to look her in the eye. She lets her palms slide down to Clarke’s hips, and Clarke tips forward, her own hands flat to other side of Raven’s hips, balancing herself above her.

“What is most important?” Raven asks her, suddenly, the words at the tip of her tongue before she thinks to form them, springing from her unbidden but urgent. Her fingers dig in to flesh, like a warning.

She imagines Clarke might tell her _to win_ , or _to triumph_.

But this is only a sign of how little Raven knows her, how their connection, such as it ever was, has been corrupted by Clarke’s absence, by the rumors that have spread in her wake, by the mythos that has risen up in her wake.

She does not answer at first at all. She leans in her for a kiss instead, slow, careful; with nimble movements, she takes down Raven’s hair, tangles her fingers in it. The kiss is a distraction, perhaps. Most likely. If so, it is working. This is the only life they have and it may be short so why waste it, she asks herself, on worrisome thoughts, on second guesses—?

Clarke pulls back slowly. Raven chases after her; a second kiss; a third; her palms skimming up beneath the hem of Clarke’s shirt.

“To continue on,” Clarke murmurs, at last. “The most important thing is to continue, as well and for as long as we can.”


	17. Miller/Jasper: Feature

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written April 4, 2019.

Double creature feature at the multiplex in the mall: Halloween throwback, disgustingly retro. He and Monty bring 3D glasses and wear them in line. Miller rolls his eyes, and Bryan stands at the edge of their group, mostly confused. The movies are not in 3D. Once the first one starts, Jasper sticks the glasses in the front pocket of his jacket and forgets they exist

The theater is quiet except for the spooky music of the opening credits, which are slow and shaking and in black and white, split with thin spider-lines, the audio hollow with low organ notes—silent but for the film and the various miscellany of theater-sounds: people coughing in the back rows, feet padding down the carpeted aisles, Monty crunching on popcorn two seats over, and Miller, to Jasper’s left, clearing his throat. He has his hand on the armrest between them, curling and uncurling his fingers around the end.

The plan was to seat Bryan at one end and Miller at the other, Jasper and Monty in between, but by chance they have ended up in entirely the wrong order, and now Jasper’s palms are sweating, and he can’t even crunch a popcorn kernel between his back teeth without feeling like every eye is on him. 

When he was a kid, and scary movies were forbidden, he and Monty would sneak them down into the Jordans’ basement and play them on the tiny little tv there, nestled in among Jasper’s dad’s various experiments and half-finished repair projects. They’d hide under a blanket as if, somehow, this would hide them from parents’ prying eyes just as well as from the monsters on the screen, and hush each other loudly whenever one or the other jumped or yelped or screamed.

Now scary movies are date movies. Perfect for huddling close, seeking safety as pretext, for hands gripping hands, white-knuckled and waiting for the door to swing open, the killer to call, the slow footsteps on the stairs to reach their peak. What he imagined when Miller asked him to the film fest on Wednesday. In the pause between words, Miller’s eyes not quite on him, he’d managed to slot ten different fantasies in between his rational thoughts, practically a new record, like his inner life on speed. He must have known even then that appearances were not what they seemed. Not that he guessed that Miller was talking about a group thing, and not only that but about bringing his ex-boyfriend, but maybe if he’s being honest with himself, he should have known. They’re still friends, or something. Or trying to be.

He and Miller aren’t a thing but they hooked up once at Miller’s party, nine sorry days after the breakup, Miller bitter about being the center of Arkadia High gossip, Jasper coming off a high, still gently floating.

Then a second time last week, sloppy kissing out behind the school, in the cool shadow of the building and in sight of the soccer field. Neither of them was wearing a jacket, despite the a cold wind blowing, loudly ripping at the American flag to create the sound of carpet-beating and the discordant jangle of the flagpole rope banging against the metal pole. Jasper memorized the sound without meaning to and played it again and again in his head that night, staring at the ceiling and waiting for sleep.

No third time, yet. Miller’s hand on the armrest between them and then, as he shifts and clears his throat again, on Jasper’s knee. The vampire is rising from his coffin, slowly. Someone, probably Monty, rustles his hand through a popcorn bucket, the kernels tumbling out of the way with a gentle whispering noise.

Jasper swallows hard and pretends that the inscrutable, evil plans of the vampire are the reason he can hardly breathe around the hard, painful lump in his throat.

He tips his popcorn—large, extra butter—in Miller’s direction and whispers, “Want some?”

“Maybe later,” Miller answers, and Jasper shrugs, and shifts a little lower in his seat. He doesn’t say anything about the hand, doesn’t do anything about it either: leaves it as the unsaid, like the monster hiding and waiting in the shadows of the room.


	18. Raven/Octavia: Moon Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written April 23, 2019.
> 
> This is an epilogue/extra scene to my fic _Moon Lights Up the Night_ , a supernatural coffee shop AU featuring werewolf!Raven.

The storm continues raging long into the night. Raven drives home slowly, cracks of lightning ripping up the clouds ahead, wheels threatening to slip on the rain-slick road, and a certain calm determination in her hands and her legs that may be undercut, may be strengthened, by Octavia’s quiet presence in the passenger seat. The short run from the driveway to the front door leaves them soaked again, eager for the indoors, and yet Raven’s fingers still tremble and fumble with the lock: Octavia huddling against her now, pretending to seek out shelter from the downpour, while she tells herself that her grip is simply too slippery from the rain.

In the entranceway, they drip on the welcome mat as the rain pounds down in heavy sheets on the pavement outside. Not meaning to linger, Raven doesn’t turn on the light. Near silent, only tentatively visible in the gloom, Octavia slides closer, cool wet hands at Raven’s waist. Cool, wet kisses as Raven holds her key still in her palm, the ridges digging into her skin.

Raven leads her upstairs and offers her the first shower, as she kicks her shoes off into the corner of the bedroom, takes down her ponytail and runs her fingers through her hair. She sees Octavia hesitate, a bit of playful smile on her face, like she wants to ask Raven to join her, before she remembers: this is still new, it is perhaps not yet time. Then she simply wraps her arms around herself and shakes her head. “It’s your house,” she says. “You first.”

She looks smaller, thinner, than usual, bedraggled from the storm, without anchor in the middle of the room.

Raven tosses her a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and insists, “You’re my guest.”

This moment might be awkward—and the ones that follow, too, as she strips off her own wet, heavy clothes and wraps a towel around herself, and perches on her bed looking at the moon scars on her legs while she listens to the shower running, and the rain coming down outside—if she hadn’t been able to infuse her voice with cocky confidence, if Octavia hadn’t flitted closer and pressed a kiss to her cheek before leaving.

Octavia is beautiful in a different sense, an unexpected sense, against the backdrop of Raven’s bed. She stretches out on top of the blanket, which they have left disheveled and not-quite in place, and points her toes, and reaches her arms up to the headboard, and she looks so relaxed and so at home and so at peace that Raven wants only to bury her nose in Octavia’s stomach, wants to press open-mouthed kisses into the softest bits of her skin. A long drumroll of thunder sounds just outside. They have turned off the overhead light, only the bedside lamp tilted up to bathe the bed itself in a yellow glow. Raven’s lips buzz with the memory of long and languid kisses, though already she can no longer feel on her skin the imprints of Octavia’s electric touch.

Not quite her skin. She’s wearing long flannel pants herself, and a t-shirt, only a few of the marks on her arms visible, and those nothing Octavia hasn’t seen before. She hadn’t expected she would be self-conscious. But she sees the way Octavia’s shirt rides up and exposes a thin line of perfect flesh along her stomach, and she is.

She props herself up on her elbow, her head on her fist, and watches Octavia’s gaze flit along the edge of the lamplight circle, across the ceiling. Lightning flashes, and Octavia’s lips move soundlessly, counting the seconds. One… two…. three… four… Then thunder like the fall of giant bowling pins. Heat rises and the windows are closed against the rain. Even though the storm has broken the worst of the unseasonal weather, still inside, a thick warmth still burdens the air.

“Next year,” Octavia announces, unexpectedly bright, and half-rolls toward Raven, gaze tilted up to her. “Next year my theme could be the moon.” She pauses a moment, as if overtaken by an uncertainty she herself could not have predicted when she first began to speak. “For Halloween,” she clarifies. “If you don’t mind.”

“The moon?” Raven asks, and reaches out to twirl a strand of hair carefully behind Octavia’s ear. “Why not wolves?”

Octavia bites back a smile. “Could be wolves. I could have cute little toy wolves on the tables. Wolf figurines on top of the pastry display. A big full moon suspended from the ceiling. Oh—a wolf playlist.” The smile breaks open, becomes a grin. “If there are enough songs for that.”

 _Put Fever on it_ , Raven thinks.

Octavia slides closer into her space, reaches up now to trace the thin spider-lines, nearly healed deep claw-scratches, that run down the length of her arm. Raven half-expects her to ask if they hurt. She hasn’t been this close to anyone, this intimate with anyone, since before the attack; she doesn’t know what the average reaction is to the signs the wolf leaves behind. Or if such a thing as an average reaction exists. But Octavia doesn’t say anything at all, and Raven finds herself staring at the thick black ink strokes of the tattoo on Octavia’s arm, feeling not that the two marks are similar, but that Octavia knows something about transformation, the way certain alterations are permanent, and can haunt, and she imagines herself someday asking about the tattoo, and answering questions about the scars in return.

“So what do you think?” Octavia asks. “Too much? The theme?”

Her voice is pitched barely above a whisper, and slightly unsteady: a moment of vulnerability, hard earned.

“I’m not sure it will beat the spiders,” Raven answers. She’s picturing the phases of the moon drawn on the coffee cup sleeves. A drink special guaranteed to make you howl. The proprietor and her werewolf girlfriend sharing kisses over the counter, unashamed. “But I have a few ideas I think could work.”


	19. Bellamy/Raven: Bomb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written April 30, 2019.

Spring tilting into summer. Bellamy standing beneath the bookstore awning, browsing old trade paperbacks from the used book cart, not truly reading the close-set black type on the page but only feeling the weight of the book and the texture of the page, yellowing, color-distorted by the noonday sun through the green awning, feeling the shade of the awning, and how it protects him from the strong gust of wind that is whipping down the street to wipe the season clean. Behind him, Jasper is speed-reading the middle chapter of a sci-fi novel from the fifties, reminding Bellamy of his presence by the way he hums under his breath. The peculiar thickness of the pages. The bluster of the wind. He barely feels it, but still he shivers in his hoodie and pulls his sleeves down farther over his hands.

That’s when he looks up and sees her, the first time he sees her. Later, he will all but convince himself that coincidence is a trick of memory, a dream he makes up later out of a jumble of parts, and mistakes for the truth. He’ll see her again. But first walking down the sidewalk past the bookstore with her long stride and her combat boots and her red jacket, sliding her thumb along the chain of her necklace down to the charm at the end. He remembers the necklace long after: metal origami bird, hard to forget. She looks at him briefly, or he thinks she does. In reality just a second but it elongates, like he’s trapped in it, a slow-motion unfurling, his heart slowing and his pulse slowing and his blood slowing in his veins.

“In a distant time,” Jasper says, from somewhere behind him, “she’d be referred to as the bomb.”

Bellamy reaches back and hits the back of his hand against Jasper’s chest, feels like it lands somewhere in the middle of him, and Jasper gives an exaggerated _oof_.

A distant time.

He meets her again at a party at Murphy’s place. This time she’s standing out on his balcony, leaning all the way forward, tipping forward into the stars. He’d like to have some thought that isn’t _she looks beautiful_ but it’s the only one that surfaces—that and the memory of her necklace, which she’s still wearing, and a replay of that moment where the wind whipped back her hair and she strode into it, that moment when she felt him staring from underneath the awning and looked back, and looked at him. If she remembers it now, she doesn’t mention it. If it happened at all, she might not remember it.

She taps her finger against the side of her plastic cup. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he nods back. Settles himself with his elbows on the balcony railing. From inside the cacophony of the party, music on too loud, inscrutable voices, bleeding out. But outside the air is cool and crisp—night air—he wants to fill his lungs. He wants to ask about the origami bird. It seems to fly out over the railing, swinging slightly with her movements.

He feels that she is watching him again.

“How’d you meet that punk?” she asks, then, gesturing back with her shoulder, and he could almost laugh; he’s never heard anyone call Murphy a punk before, and he’s not sure if it’s a compliment or insult.

“Old friend,” he answers. “You?”

“Complicated.”

Ah. Right. Exes without the words. Murphy doesn’t talk about the vagaries of his love life, and Bellamy has never asked, would never ask, doesn’t now. He turns toward her, still leaning one elbow on the railing, takes a slow, deep, breath like he’s taking her in, like he wants to take her in, because she’s staring at him all-out now with challenge in her eyes.

She’ll introduce herself, soon: Raven, not a bomb but an explosion, the detonation of the bomb, the moment after the bomb, the devastation after the bomb. He feels himself flare. She could be ruination. She could be exactly what he’s been seeking for a long time.


	20. Bellamy/Clarke: Tears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written May 5, 2019, for bellarkebc on tumblr.

At the moment of Atom’s death, Bellamy is watching Clarke’s face, which is marked by a soft, gentle sadness, but no tears. Atom does not need to see her crying. Clarke, framed by the slow-turning green of the trees, and scraps of sky, will be his last vision on Earth, the vision that leads him to whatever comes next, and he needs to be able to believe that the journey will be peaceful. So she does not weep. Pinpricks of tears in the corners of her eyes perhaps—Bellamy thinks he sees them glistening, imagines they feel like the hard stop of mourning that blocks his throat—but no more.

Only later, that night easing into the next morning, in the gray hour before dawn, does he hear her crying. He’s walking by her tent on the way to his own, at the end of his guard shift, when he notices an ugly, retching sound, the sound of harsh tears snagged on uneven, gulping breaths, coming from inside. He sees her silhouette splashed up against the side, bent over, her hair loose around her shoulders, and the part of him that is reasonable and that knows they are not friends knows he should keep walking. He should forget he’s heard this. But he can’t. He can’t because he was watching her expression as she was watching Atom die, and he thinks it’s changed him in some small and subtle way, and if so than it must have changed her too. 

He rolls his shoulders back to ease the tension aching between them, then leans over, and knocks against the zipped-up entrance to the tent. The sound is not a knocking, really, but rather a scratching of knuckles against vinyl, a pawing sound rising up out of the dark. He sees the way her shadow startles. A pause. She straightens up and he hears her sniffing, pulling back the rest of her tears, imagines that she’s wiping the remnants of them from her eyes with the back of her fists, and then her voice, watery, sill forceful, calls out, “Who is it?”

“Bellamy,” he answers. He tries not to be too loud. His voice comes out sounding scratchy, almost uncertain. He kneels down, hoping that she’ll let him in. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

That, perhaps, the end of it. She doesn’t say anything more for a long moment, and he starts to feel silly, one knee in the cold, damp dirt.

Then, abruptly, the loud disruption of the zipper being pulled up and along the outline of the door, or what passes for a door in a tent, and the flap of fabric falls forward, and he catches sight of her face, red-eyed and drawn, peering up at him from other side. “You want to come in?”

He nods, and awkwardly climbs through.

Clarke edges to the far end of her cot, to give him room to sit beside her. She’s wrapped her arms around her bent knees, which makes her look unusually small, makes Bellamy feel all the more gargantuan and out of place as he perches at the other end, on top of her neatly tucked in blanket, his own arms crossed on top of his knees. Now that he’s here, he doesn’t know what to say. _I’m sorry_ feels stupid but also the most accurate, because he is sorry: sorry it happened, sorry it had to be her, sorry that Atom was one of his men, and at the end he had no idea what to do.

He considers _do you want to talk about it,_ too _,_ but that seems even worse.

But he can’t just sit here and say nothing, so he opens his mouth, and what comes out is: “Thank you.”

Clarke looks up abruptly, even more surprised than he is, her eyes narrow. She sniffs again, and rubs the tip of her fingers underneath her eye, a fast gesture, as if wiping away the last of her old tears. “For what?”

_For doing what someone had to do._

“For comforting him. He—”

 _He needed that. It was the right thing to do._ Shit she already knows.

“Everyone deserves that, at—when they’re dying.”

Clarke nods, but her expression is so pinched, her lips so thin, her eyes glinting so sharply in the gloom, that he expects she cannot answer, that she would burst out crying again if she tried.

Very slowly, he shifts closer, waiting for her to hold up her hand or warn him away. She doesn’t. He puts his hand on her shoulder, and beneath his touch, she starts to collapse. She hides her face in her hands. He wraps his arm around her. She slides, with slow inevitability, closer to him, her head on his chest, and he holds her close and tells her that it’s okay, not because it is, not because he thinks she will believe him, but just so she can hear the soft rumble of his voice. All he can offer: this reminder that she is not alone.


	21. Jasper/Monty: Braid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written May 26, 2019.
> 
> This fic is set in the same universe as my Monty/Raven fic _Signal Flare_ , an alternate universe in which Monty is a Grounder.

Monty has his fantasies too, about the far-flung reaches of the Earth, the places he has never seen and may never see. Some of them he’s never shared with anyone, but he’ll bring them out and tell them to Jasper, over dinner or on walks around the settlement or while stargazing at night. He always finds himself surprised at the places where their imaginations overlap and then diverge. 

Jasper grew up on visions of a pre-war Earth, populated with cityscapes, interconnected with impossible, advanced tech, and these histories he intermingled with imaginary landscapes of a planet utterly regrown and undisturbed, a post-human planet, the sort of wild and abandoned nature he and his people thought was all they would find upon their return to the ground. Monty took the stories he’d heard of the other clans and their territory, of the bitter cold of Azgeda winters, of the rolling sea waves around the Floukru ship, of the endless horizons of the Ingranronakru plains, and transformed them into the backdrop of his imaginary adventures, which are sometimes as fantastical as Jasper’s stories, other times shockingly ordinary, tinged with a verisimilitude a space person could never conceive.

But they both want to strike out upon impulsive quests; they can both close their eyes and set themselves upon endless journeys; they both desire more than can be forced inside a single lifetime or even a single mind, and between the two of them, they find new possibilities unfurling, a multiplicity of alternate lives.

None of Monty’s fantasies, growing up, were ever broad enough to encompass the sky, because he never took seriously the rumors that, somehow, people had lived there once upon a time, and might be living there still. He might have glanced up toward the stars once, or twice, and wondered, what would it be like if it were true, but the endless dark above never felt to him like the province of man. Sometimes even now, living within the belly of a downed starship, he does not quite believe.

(“You see those stars?” Jasper asked, once, pointing up at a small cluster of twinkling lights above, and Monty adjusted the rolled-up jacket he’d propped up behind his head, and nodded. “That was the view outside my window.”

Said this with a straight face, so Monty believed him, and laughed when he realized his own joke had flown right over Monty’s head.

But wasn’t it possible? What other view could he have had, but the stars, and couldn’t he have come to know them intimately, to memorize them, as Monty has memorized the trees and the flowers outside his old home?)

Now Monty is living in a space ship with crumpled in walls and holes in the ceiling, a ship that in some places has started to merge with the Earth, and that in other places still seems as perfectly intact, as claustrophobic and narrow and contained, as it must have felt when it was still afloat in the sky. Jasper’s room, which is not really _his room_ but only the quarters he has recently taken for himself, as he likes to remind Monty, when he questions what it must have been like _to grow up here_ , is of the claustrophobic sort. Deep in the center of the ship, away from the outer walls, away from the windows. Monty’s sitting on the floor, Jasper on the bed behind him, lazily braiding Monty’s hair. He’s not doing a very good job of it, braiding loosely and letting long strands fall from the sides, to either side of Monty’s face, but that’s all right. Sometimes Jasper needs the quiet company. Sometimes Monty does, too.

“Why don’t you have any tattoos?” Jasper asks him, as he pulls the braid apart, then starts to comb it loose with his fingers.

“Who says I don’t?” he answers. Half-smiles when he feels Jasper’s hands pause in their work.

A moment later, he starts braiding again. “Yeah? Are you fucking with me?”

“Maybe.” Then, another beat, pulling his knees up to his chest, arms slung around them, “If you grow your hair out, I can teach you how to braid it properly.”

Jasper makes a disbelieving noise, almost a snort.

“What’s that for? Should I be offended?”

“What? No, just—I don’t think I could pull off the long-hair look.”

“The shaggy-dog thing you have going now is the first step.”

Another stifled laugh behind him, but it’s good, it’s good because Jasper laughs so much less often now than he used to, those early days together at the old dropship camp.

“Actually, I was thinking of cutting it all off,” he’s saying. He doesn’t let go of the half-finished braid even when Monty turns around to gauge the expression on his face. “Really. It’s getting too long, like you said.”

Monty doesn’t answer, and Jasper’s confidence wavers. “What? You don’t like the idea?” Said almost as if Monty’s opinion really mattered, as if he’d change his mind if Monty disapproved.

“No, I do.” He turns fully around, leaning up on his knees—Jasper’s hands drop to his lap, the loose braid immediately slides apart and Monty’s hair falls back around his shoulders—and reaches up to run his fingers through Jasper’s hair, pulling it back to show the high, gaunt angles of his face. “Think I should cut mine too?”

Jasper shrugs, but the corner of his mouth curls up. “Skaikru camouflage,” he answers. “Sure. You’d almost pass for one of us. Just don’t go showing off your secret tattoos.”


	22. Raven/Gina: Body

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written May 29, 2019.
> 
> This fic is set in the same universe as my Bellarke high school au [oh well, you've got me under your spell](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12733806/chapters/29036817%20rel=).

Raven Reyes has a body to die for. To die for—such a dramatic phrase to flit into Gina’s head, as she stands in the back row of the volleyball court, watching Raven on the other side of the net. She’s lean and slim and has beautiful, toned legs, and Gina’s seen her at the bench press down in the basement of the gym, lifting more than some of the guys can, and now she’s running to get to the ball before it can reach the gym floor, her ponytail waving behind her, and Gina cannot take her eyes away. She isn’t jealous, even though she still has the same round face she had in middle school, and her own body is soft, or appears soft, at least. She’s had her share of experience lifting boxes and shifting supplies in the back of her dad’s store, a bit of experience that doesn’t seem to translate to the artificial contests of strength down in the weight room—but her strength never fails her when she needs it, and that’s what matters.

She’s not sporty either, like Raven is, and not competitive, like Raven’s friend Clarke, who has already slid on her knees along the shining, hard floor of the gym three times in one game, and two out of those three times managed to save the ball at the last moment. Clarke isn’t the most skilled at sports but she hates to lose as much as Raven does, or more, and Gina doesn’t understand the feeling, but she admires it, in a way. Not that she’d ever rack up bruises, like the ones she knows Clarke will catalogue later, in the locker room, checking over her arms and legs as she gets dressed, just to win a game that will fade into the past as soon as the bell rings.

Eventually, Gina will rotate around to serve, and if she’s lucky she’ll manage to get the ball over the net. But until then she’s all but useless to her team. Too distracted. Watching Raven, not jealous, not wanting to look like her or to be her, but feeling all the same like she might die, or might perhaps ascend to some new plane, if they should happen again to run into each other as they did once, a couple weeks ago, in the locker room after gym. The air was stuffy, almost grossly humid. A few strands of hair had come out of Raven’s pony tale and ended up plastered to the side of her neck, still slick with sweat. She pinched the front of her t-shirt between two fingers and waved it back and forth as they talked, to cool herself down, but the room was muggy, streaked with steam from the showers, and despite her efforts, her cheeks remained lightly flushed.

Gina remembers vaguely talking about their geometry homework. She remembers looking at Raven’s neck, her shoulders, the strand of loose hair, the pinch of her fingers and the front of her blue t-shirt. She remembers feeling for the first time that sense of something that is not jealousy, that feels too pleasant and too exciting to be jealousy, starting to rise in her, warming her skin, parching her throat, a sensation she still does not name but which makes her smile as, on the other side of the court, now Raven jumps high into the air and spikes.


	23. Clarke/Lexa: Sunrise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written June 2, 2019, for ellavere on tumblr.

The apartment looks different in the hazy pre-dawn light: foreign and uncertain, not yet fully formed. Which makes Clarke, who is also ill-formed and foreign and new, the perfect trespasser. She steps out of the bedroom on quiet, bare feet, still undressed, closes the door nearly soundlessly behind her, takes in the gray half-shadows of the furniture, the poorly defined angles of the bookcase and the doorway, the plush curves of the sofa and the scattered takeout boxes left strewn across the coffee table. She has never before walked around naked in someone else’s home. It feels wonderfully illicit.

She picks her way through the main room, unable to stop grinning, beautifully awake despite the hour, the soft warmth of the hardwood floor speaking of late summer beneath her feet. When she notices the first hints of early-morning light peaking in through the crack between the closed floor-length curtains, she twitches them apart with her fingers and peers through. And: not windows at all, she sees now, but the glass door of a balcony. A little balcony with a view of the skyline, outlined in pink by the rising sun.

She inhales a sharp breath, her hand over her mouth. Oh, that is where she needs to be. But not utterly nude, that might be too much, so she creeps back across the room, through the door into the bedroom, and gently pulls the top sheet from the tangle of bedclothes on the bed. Lexa is still asleep. And Clarke could wake her up and call her to see the sunrise, but she doesn’t want to be mean. She is a guest, after all, and this is the first time she’s woken up in Lexa’s bed.

Wrapping the sheet carefully around herself, feet still bare, she shuffles back out to the main room, the soft gray fabric sweeping along behind her like the train of a long gown. The door to the balcony s locked, but she quickly clicks it open, slides the door to the right, and steps outside.

The rigid, cold cement of the balcony floor is not as pleasant on her soles as the hardwood inside, and sets her shivering, just as much as the cool morning air as it warns of coming fall. But that’s all right. She wraps the sheet tighter around herself and runs her fingers through her loose, tangled hair, shoving it back over her shoulders as she turns to face the rising sun.

“Sure is beautiful, isn’t it?” a voice behind her asks, and Clarke jumps. The sudden movement almost knocks over one of the candles arranged on the little tray beside her. She presses her hand to her chest, where her heart is still beating painfully hard, and turns, and smiles a warm and lovely smile.

Behind her: Lexa, wrapped in a short green robe, her own hair loose and sleep-tousled around her shoulders, leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed against her chest. She looks bleary still, and soft. Nothing like the wicked-sharp and uncompromising Poli Sci student Clarke ran into on her first day in the city. Something a little like the shy date, who took her on a tour of Boston, showed her the best spots to grab a quick cup of coffee on the go, sat with her on a bench under the shade of a tree and admitted she’d been hurt once, not very long ago; who hesitated over their first kiss; who first suggested Chinese take out for dinner; who smiled, almost sly, when Clarke asked if she wanted to take her home.

“I think it’s the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen,” Clarke answers, though she is not looking at the sunrise.

Lexa laughs, and comes to stand next to her, shoulder to shoulder as they lean forward on the balcony ledge. “Is it the only sunrise you’ve ever seen?” she asks. She already knows that Clarke is not a morning person.

“Maybe.”

“Oh, sure."  

And now without thinking, Clarke’s hand has moved to cover Lexa’s hand.

And the first rays of morning light, clear and warm and glowing, are spilling out over the horizon, bands of pink and gold across the sky, picking out the sharp corners of the buildings, sparking the September air with warmth. Clarke closes her eyes, for just a moment, because for that moment, the beauty of it seems too much to take in.


	24. Miller/Jackson: Offender

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written June 3, 2019.

Drinking after hours in the low-grade quarters of some guys he doesn’t even know, all the way out on Tesla, should be beneath him—he’s not an apprentice anymore—but Jackson is enjoying himself all the same. The moonshine is better than anything his friends could ever cook up, and the guy in the armchair next to him, one of Clarke’s friends, has been eyeing him all night. Or that’s the buzz talking. But he can’t complain. Whatever weariness has dulled his senses is now itself dulled, by the lazy company and the disgusting fire of this illicit booze, and he’s so relaxed that even Clarke has joked that she’s never seen him like this before.

Now she’s sinking herself into the corner at the other end of the couch, with her knees up to her chest and her heels digging into the cushions, her glass cradled against her chest like something precious, easily stolen. She’s trying to tell a story but she’s lost the thread, which always happens when she’s had too much because she thinks she’s so much more lucid than she is, and the two guys who actually live here are on the floor, exchanging glances like they think they’re subtle.

And into the silence of one of Clarke’s long pauses, the guy in the armchair leans forward and says, “All right, all right, all right. How about this.” Slam of his empty cup, a little too loud, on the table. “Let’s play a game. Let’s play two truths and a lie.”

The guy is from Alpha, and he’s Clarke’s age. That’s how she knows him. And he in turn knows their hosts from—somewhere. Jackson’s head is slightly spinning.

“Two truths and a lie?” Clarke asks, and arches an eyebrow. “Are we sixteen, Miller?”

He mimics her expression, an exaggerated mockery, but otherwise doesn’t take the bait. He’s leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, close enough to reach out and bump his knee against Jackson’s knee. “You and me, we go first.”

“Pretty much have to,” one of their hosts, the brewer of moonshine, says blearily from the floor. “We all know each other.”

And Jackson doesn’t know a thing.

“Shoot,” he says.

The guy, Miller, bites his lip and looks down at his feet, like he’s pretending to think, and then up again and catches Jackson’s eye. Right and steady. “Okay. I used to be engaged. I’m straight. And I was a juvenile offender.”

Doesn’t blink. Keeps his voice clear.

Jackson’s throat feels too dry, so he downs the rest of his drink. Somewhere in the fuzz and shine of his thoughts he perceives a message, not subtly sent. But like double vision he focuses first on the second sentence, then the third, and then somehow he’s trying to picture this man as someone’s husband, which seems impossible, and is that the message? That a straight ex-con is flirting with him in the dead hour of the night?

“I’m supposed to say the third one,” he says, after a pause perhaps too long, and aware only when he speaks of the others’ eyes on him. “You’re lying about the Skybox.”

Miller shakes his head, short and sharp. “Wrong,” he says. “I’m lying—” His foot bumps against Jackson’s, hard sole against hard sole. “About being straight.”

A beat. Jackson wondering what to say. One of the hosts, pulling the sleeves of his bomber jacket over his hands like a nervous tic: “Doesn’t take a mad genius to figure that one out. You know he was making it easy for you.”

The other one pulls himself to his feet. Clarke is hanging her head over the back of the couch, her long hair trailing down the arm of it and to the floor. Miller has ducked his gaze down as if embarrassed and Jackson, who recognizes in some distant way that he should be embarrassed, is only excited, a small and hazy smile on his lips. 

“Just don’t have sex on my couch,” Clarke’s friend says, as he picks his way between them, starting to stretch and yawn as he stumbles along. “Actually, you know what—all of you should just get out.”


	25. Murphy/Raven: No More Fun and Games of the Mind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on June 4, 2019, for cicichip on tumblr, for my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: Naughty Girls Need Love, Too by Samantha Fox.

“Careful, Reyes,” he warns, all smirk, as she tilts up her chin and looks at him. She’s lying back against the excess of pillows on her bed, one arm outstretched and lazily draped above her, the bedsheet pooled around her waist and Murphy slotted between her legs, propped up one elbow, watching her. A moment ago, he was pressing a line of open-mouthed kisses up her body, devouring her.

Careful, careful—

She recognizes that tone. It’s the same one he used the first night, at the club where they met. Slid onto the stool next to hers—she was leaning back with both elbows on the bar, scanning for someone she might know, or might want to know—and didn’t speak until she’d turned to glance at him. Only a glance at first, lightly curious.

“Raven Reyes,” he said, not a question, only a slow drawl. Like he was swirling her name around on his tongue. She took him in slow, wondering why he seemed familiar, where they might have met, who he might be.

Took her time at the task and then, light: “Do we know each other?”

He shrugged. “We have some friends in common.” He was not cool or particularly smooth but she liked the way he inched in closer, leaned in like he was ready to swap secrets, let his arm fall down onto the bar so that his fingers almost touched her arm and then gestured, vaguely: “Your reputation precedes you.”

So she knew right away that he wanted her immensely and that he knew where he stood, knew that she might be interested in him for a time, but only a time.

Raven Reyes. Your reputation precedes you.

Perhaps it did. She found herself, later, tracing a circle around the buttonhole at the cuff of his jacket, while he propped his head up with one elbow on the bar and watched her close and careful and straight, a rare sort of attention when she spoke. And later still, pressed up against the side of a bathroom stall, his breath hot, his tongue in her mouth. At the time, she still knew what she was doing. She was still sure of herself, her ability to take him home and then forget him, still sure that every emotion was only a phantasm of a feeling, something that would fade in the sunlight, leaver her safe and whole in the bright calm of the day.

Now he’s tracing the line of her jaw with his fingertips, leaning in to kiss her, slow and remarkably soft.

“Careful?” she asks, when he pulls away. He’s staring at her under half-closed eyelids, and she’s still fairly sure that she can read him, but the riot of her own feeling makes her doubt.

“Yeah.” He passes his thumb briefly across her bottom lip. “You look so happy, I might start getting ideas. Like that you’re not about to kick me out of bed.”

Passing touch, starting at his hip, trailing the tips of her fingers up his back. Drawing him closer, drawing him in. Nose to nose. “Funny,” she exhales, “because I was thinking of you letting you stay.”


	26. Bellamy/Clarke: When the World Comes In

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on June 5, 2019, for queen-of-the-wallflowers15 on tumblr, for my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: Don't Drea It's Over by Crowded House.

Clarke looks half-Grounder, in her long coat and her black leather gloves. Half-Grounder and half-child, playing dress up in Grounder clothes, as she sits on a rock outside the entrance to Mount Weather with her shoulders bent, and looks down at her hands. Bellamy is standing in the open door, which seems now like nothing, thick and heavy iron but now swung wide, useless, all the fear and the terror of it sapped away as if it had never been. He watches her, knowing by her stillness that she has not noticed him. Beyond her, the sky has turned a bruised shade of brown, and he wonders if it will rain. Oh, but he hopes it will not rain.

He cannot wrap his mind around this, that they have won, and it has left them hollow. 

The quiet stillness of the aftermath, the heavy threat of rain in the air: he wishes that it were a coming storm instead, a storm that would perhaps wash away this bitter taste and clear out the fuzzy feeling in his head. How tired he is. How the air presses in close. He leans against the iron door and watches Clarke as she takes off her gloves and turns her hands over in her lap, staring at them as if they were someone else’s hands, or as if she were searching for blood or wounds or scars upon them. Her movements are so slow and so unsteady, he would worry about her, if he did not understand so well the numb distance she must feel from her own body. Something is breaking down in him. An accelerated decay, disgust and guilt quickly turned into sorrow, and then into something else again. A taste unaccountably left on the tip of his tongue.

A sort of longing, he thinks.

They’d talked, Clarke had talked, of Mount Weather as a battle, and that had been easy: an attack, a strike, a confrontation of armies. Forces meeting as equals and according to some rules, somehow innately understood, of fairness. But now in the suffocating aftermath, wondering if this is always the choked and desiccated feeling of survival, he sees the mission not as war at all, despite himself. What it might be he can’t be sure. Something awful he has done, something taken from him. The leveling of the world, the slow accumulation of the next impossible task: that of moving on from this, that of healing. And he wants to walk over to her, put his hands on her shoulders, because she looks like his Clarke but in costume, someone who has been pulled away from him, someone he needs to find again.

The moment stretches on and on and he wonders how, in this shallow space on the Mountainside, beneath a sky crowding dark with clouds, no idea of the hour except that the endless night is over and morning is burning through and they’re still here—how the smallness of these seconds can hold.

She’s going to take this all on herself, he knows, because he knows her, and because he’s seen her these last weeks, the ugly and admirable and desperate control she’s pulled toward herself. Because he sees the way she is covering her face with her hands. He can’t tell if she’s crying but he knows this road before them now is long, that they will live long, that what they have done will be them a long time. A long time.

So he crosses the space between them and puts his hands on her shoulders and holds her steady in his grip, pretending he is strong, as he feels the soft touch of her hand reaching up to cover his.


	27. Murphy/Raven: I Need You Here By Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on June 8, 2019, for idontwantto10 on tumblr, as part of my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: Rebel Yell by Billy Idol.

When Murphy hears the roar of the engine, turning the corner and coming down his street, he walks to the window and parts the curtains with his fingertips. Beneath him, the midnight-quiet neighborhood: a few windows still glowing with electric yellow light, but no pedestrians, no traffic. She’s stopped her bike beneath the streetlight right outside his building. Under the spotlight, she takes her helmet off and shakes her hair loose. He watches it curl around her shoulders and his mouth turns dry. Keeps watching as she takes off her gloves and shoves them in her jacket pockets, and then dismounts, and only then, looks up toward his window and catches his eye, notices him staring like he’s long been waiting for her.

He buzzes her up but waits for the knock on his door before he unlocks it, night-silence disturbed by the slide and rattle of the chain, the solid, heavy click of the deadbolt, and lets her in. “Pretty late for a social call, isn’t it, Reyes?” he asks, but she’s already striding past him, putting her helmet down on his coffee table like she owns the place. The words are just a placeholder as he locks the door again: she’s always over late. This has been their routine for a long time.

“Who says this is a social call?” she answers, turning, and then he’s pinned against the door.

She cages him in with two hands pressed flat to either side of his head, and he can feel the peephole digging into the back of his scalp, and the sides of her boots against his sock feet, and her mouth, against his, her tongue searching out the inner caverns of his mouth. He hooks his fingers through her belt loops, not to tug her closer, but to hold her where she is, and opens his mouth wide to her mouth. Sometimes with Raven, sex can feel like an attack, and even a wild kiss a first warning shot, but not this time, and not because of any new softness to her, but because of something wild and searching, like a thick jungle vine, that is growing up unstoppably within him.

Something that feeds not just on the low tone of her voice some nights, raspy and uneven in his ear, never begging but only demanding, calling him by his last name; but on the few mornings that she’s still in his apartment when he wakes, in his t-shirt and his socks, standing in the kitchen and up on her toes and searching through the cupboards above the stove; on the evenings when she’s lounging on his couch with her heels up on his coffee table and her knees bent and in the quiet stretch at the end of the movie where the credits start to play, she lets them play, and admits to whatever mood this is that inspired her to seek his company; and on the frantic need that he reads sometimes not in her kisses but in the way she rests her palms on either side of his face and looks into his eyes and won’t let him go, even though in those moments the vine is squeezing not around his heart but around his lungs, and he worries that he has lost the memory of how to breathe.

Because he’d do just about anything for her.


	28. Bellamy/Clarke: We Spoke of Wintertime in France

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on June 13, 2019, for take-me-to-planety-equity on tumblr, as part of my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: Metro by Berlin.

Clarke stands with her hands in her pockets, one of only a few people on the platform, waiting on the last train home. The name of the station is picked out in blue and white tiles on the wall across from her. The air is sharp and cool in a way that is specific to concrete and the underground. She has a letter, folded in half and wrinkled, stuck in the back pocket of her jeans. And she feels, with that species of certainty that comes only in the clear-eyed late-night hours, listening to the empty echoes of footsteps–someone pacing at the other end of the platform, someone else coughing into his hand–that she understands everything now.

The letter starts _Dearest Clarke_ , which is obscene.

The last time she saw Bellamy, he was wearing a white button-down shirt, which was unlike him, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, which was. She was getting off the metro then, too, climbing up the steps, fighting to open her umbrella and barely looking up until she hit the street. London in April, the rain coming down hard to hiss and splash along the pavement, an unusual hot spring rain, topped by darkening thunderclouds, too easily turning into steam. And Bellamy waiting for her beneath the awning of a restaurant, with his own umbrella open, crowded in among the tables. She kissed him on the cheek, but he was cold.

She remembers this and also the way he held her hands across the table while they sat together under the awning, two black coffees between them, their umbrellas shoved under the table and almost on top of their feet. The rain coming down so hard that it was almost impossible to hear him, when the rumble of his voice dropped too low. How he spoke of the time they’d spent apart and the distances and his sense that he no longer knew her, whatever that was supposed to mean. Like she had become someone else in her own absence. He felt like a stranger, holding her hands.

The letter came later and was maybe, almost, an apology ( _dearest Clarke_ )—maybe just nostalgia. She’s read it so many times that certain cadences of it have become deep-ingrained in her memory like old nursery rhymes. It’s addressed to her apartment in Paris, a city they used to daydream about together, cuddled under blankets in the middle of a cold spell, their faulty old radiator clacking and bumping like a ghost in the twilight, and none of the lights on. _You know it almost never snows in Paris? Not a lot of snow. Not very cold. We could visit in the winter; we could walk along the Seine._

On the way to see him again in London, two years later, she found herself on the Underground, sitting next to the door as the car filled up and new arrivals had to stand. The man next to her had fallen asleep. She remembers now how she listened to the noises he made in his sleep and wondered what he was dreaming. Bellamy also made sounds as he slept. Early on, she would wake sometimes and wonder if he was about to wake too, prop herself up on her elbow and listen to him, trying to make out the words he mumbled in his dreams. What he might divulge of himself, without meaning to. What she could collect of him, slot into her understanding of him, in the secret quiet of his bed late at night.

Her understanding is that he is brave, but the letter is cowardly, because it is a letter and so ardent. _I love you always. I have loved you always._ But not quite going so far as to say he misses her, or has any regrets.

The train arrives first as a wide beam of light cutting through the darkness of the tunnel, a building rumble of noise, a screech of wheels and iron. The metal slide of the doors opening, and the electric light of the inside of the cars, cozy in their familiarity, their impersonal grey plastic seats and dulled gray floor welcoming her in. Clarke steps over the threshold and takes a seat toward the back end of the car, far away from the two other people already on board. One is asleep, the other scrolling through her phone.

She hadn’t known what to say that afternoon in London, in the rain. She had felt so disconnected from Bellamy, and from herself, that she could almost believe that he was right and she was not, in some fundamental and necessary way, who she had been. Waves of sadness came later, and anger after that. How he had dared to love her, how love had seemed like a promise now broken. She understands now that he was telling the truth but that he was also afraid, and that he is still afraid, or he would not have written this letter to her. But she does not feel guilty for frightening him.

She takes the letter from her pocket, unfolds it, and begins reading it again.


	29. Miller/Bryan: Never Hesitating to Become the Fated Ones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on June 17, 2019, for anonymous on tumblr, as part of my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: Take My Breath Away by Berlin.

Does he have dramatic fantasies where they find each other again, in some impossible, unprecedented way? Where he opens up the dropship door, dazed, so high on fear and wonder that his feet hardly touch the ground, and there’s Bryan standing among the grass and the trees and smiling, and waiting for him? Where they are together and alone beneath a wide and open sky?

No, of course not, because that’s not a life that he is living. Shuffle the cards: he could be anywhere right now. In the Skybox. In his father’s quarters. In Bryan’s, under the covers of his bed, hiding and holding his breath to stay quiet and laughter bubbling up in his chest. He could have been born on Earth before the bombs. He could have been arrested and acquitted, let out of the main doors of Prison Station for the first time in ten months and three weeks and two days and then Bryan again on the other side of the door—always Bryan waiting for him on the other side, that’s what these thoughts always circle back to, that’s how life always works out in the end. He could have been first generation Grounder, living on the Ark, playing out plans for his return instead of fantasies. He could have been any generation but the return generation. But now he’s here. Just the slightest chance, and suddenly his boots are sticking in the mud from last night’s rain, and the air is inexplicably cool, and he pulls his beanie down low and almost to his eyes.

He’s here to look forward, not to look back—here to make a new life for himself, not go about worrying about how he never got to say goodbye. He knows that Monty’s working on a way to get back in touch with the ship. But Miller’s fairly sure he’ll throw his lot in with Bellamy, who’s set to run things, who is from Factory and doesn’t want Alpha fucks such as himself coming down and ruining a good time. Miller understands the impulse. He doesn’t want his good time ruined. Freedom tastes like fresh air and sharp winds and dirt and flowers and crunchy old leaves. He just wants to breathe it in.

So he does not bring out those fantasies of other lives, even in the late night, sitting outside his tent and listening to Monroe and Sterling talking in hushed voices on the inside, their shadows like great grey splashes against the vinyl, and waiting for the rain to return. There’s a chance some other type of him is running across a space as vast as the Ark itself, running, counting down a clock… Is this a hero fantasy, or a romantic one? Can he force himself to stop missing someone who once felt like, maybe, the start of, the love of his life?

Is Bryan waiting for him? Are their paths somehow to cross again?

Another dropship could land, doors opening in a hiss of steam, Miller right at the front of the crowd waiting for the next round of survivors, of returnees, to disembark, and then Bryan running down the gangplank to him, into him, and they land in the new mud and the old leaves and the rain.

Or they could never see each other again.

He could be at the start of a new life that has no connection to the old, which is what Bellamy wants, which is what most of them want, which is what Murphy wants when he flirts in that lazy, sardonic, drawling way he has and Miller flirts back but never lets the game play out, not all the way, swerves it into a joke at the end because he’s not sure if he’s supposed to be faithful. How long until there’s no one to be faithful to.

He waits it out four months, five, survives a war, survives the Mountain, survives the cold, frosty winter in Camp Jaha, and the day they raise the Arkadia sign over the gate. Sits in the radio room searching for beacon signals. Nothing. Static. Waits it out.

Waits it out until Bryan comes back to him, in a dramatic and unprecedented way. The front gates creaking open, Farm Station survivors trooping in. Miller in his Guard uniform, standing at attention, imagining conversations in his head, in which Bryan mocks him, in which he says, _you aren’t who you were_ , as if who he is could ever be a static thing. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, and searching through the crowd.

And then he sees him, Bryan, thinner than he was but wearing his old red hoodie still—Miller hooked his hands in the pockets of that hoodie once, drew him close, their first kiss—and he’s looking out and around and up, up at the Alpha Station arch. So he does not see Miller at first. And Miller’s heart gets blocked up somewhere in his lungs, until Bryan turns and, by chance, looks at him, and runs to him, and Miller runs to meet him. And they throw themselves at each other, meeting each other again, feet planted in the thawing mud of spring.


	30. Miller/Bryan: Everybody Doin' Their Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on June 23, 2019, for skaifayax on tumblr, as part of my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: Paradise City by Guns 'n' Roses.

Miller returns to LA in June. He’s got two duffel bags in the backseat of a car given to him by an ex-boyfriend, a wallet in his back pocket with his life savings in it, and a few contacts, a few old friends he figures still remember him. The car is a piece of junk and he’d sell it if he could, but he knows he’ll need it in the city. Sometime near midnight, he calls up Bellamy from a payphone while the swift rush of traffic splashes headlights over the highway, still alight from the persistent summer heat and the buzz he always feels when he drives after dark, and gets permission to crash at his place for a bit. Bellamy sounds groggy and sleep-hazy and he doesn’t want to stay on the line for very long. “Sure, whatever,” he says, and, “Don’t wake me up when you come in,” and then hangs up.

Bellamy’s loft is like a halfway house for lost boys, most of whom Miller already knows. Murphy is the one to let him in. He punches Miller on the arm; Miller messes up his hair like he’s some dumbass little brother. Then he falls asleep on a mattress lifted up off the floor by a thin metal frame, underneath which he stashes his bags. He forgets to turn off the lamp that’s sitting on an empty milk crate next to him, and when he wakes in the morning, it’s the bright imitation sun burning his eyes.

Everyone in LA is trying to get famous or to ride the coattails of someone else’s fame, but Miller considers himself mostly a leech, of the undiscriminating source. He’s here because he knows people, because even though the city isn’t home, he still ends up circling it again and again, like water around a drain, like a moth that keeps on flying into a naked bulb.

A few days short of July, he meets Bryan, who’s doing honest work at a food co-op and not, despite the defined muscles of his arms and his abs and his broad, strong back, trying to get into acting, or modeling, Bryan who wants  to sell him tomatoes, who offers to cook for him, who flirts with him so bravely and so obviously, that Miller already knows he’ll take him home. He’s never felt so domestic, chatting a guy up over carrots and lettuce. Being chatted up.

He expects something like a fling but two weeks later, Bryan’s standing in the kitchen of the loft, leaning back against the counter with a high beam of sunlight through the window, picking out blond highlights in his brown hair, and Miller’s yawning into the back of his hand, wondering what day it is and if Bryan was wearing that gray t-shirt last night or not. Everything is blurring. “Where do you really want to be?” Bryan’s asking, with a sort of impatience that tells Miller he’s asked this question before.

“What?”

“I mean, not LA, obviously.”

“Obviously.” He takes a couple lazy, flat-footed steps forward, cages Bryan in with one hand to either side of him, palms flat on the countertop. Movements that play out as if they were random, but are forthrightly designed.

Bryan hooks one finger into the waistband of Miller’s jeans, all he’s wearing, and threatens to pull him closer. Doesn’t yet. Miller knows if he leaned in, Bryan would duck out of his way. As if this were very important, this conversation. But his eyelids feel heavy. He hasn’t taken a shower since yesterday; he can feel old sweat still on his skin.

“You’re the first person I’ve met in a long time who isn’t yearning for something,” Bryan says.

And Miller closes his eyes, tight, like he’s hoping a hallucination will be gone when he opens them. And this is almost true. Whatever he sees when he looks up again, he’d like it to be real.

“Who says I’m not?” he asks. First true thing he’s said in a long time.

Bryan trails his fingertips too lightly up Miller’s sides, slowly, enough to make his breath hitch. Teasing, breaking. Then one palm to the side of his face. The gentlest touch Miller has felt in a long time.


	31. Miller/Bryan: You Want A Piece of My Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on July 2, 2019, for anonymous on tumblr, as part of my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: Working for the Weekend, by Loverboy.

Office job or hell?

Office job or hell?

Miller’s not asking himself which is worse. He’s wondering where, exactly, he is right now: white button-down shirt and tie that always feels too tight, shoes he has to shine, making copies, listening to the high screech of the machine and watching the blinding, roving band of light as it passes back and forth, on repeat, on repeat, on repeat.

He doesn’t quit because he needs to be able to pay his rent but that’s not his reason for coming in, day after day. Not even sheer necessity is enough to get him up in the morning, riding the subway with his fingers clenched around the metal bar above his head and bodies jostling him, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, as the car sways along with an unvarying rhythm, underneath him, around him. Swaying and swaying. He’s not slumping into the abyss of his off-gray cubicle like he’s entering some other world of sick fluorescent light because he simply has to but because, if he comes in, when he comes in, he knows eventually, at some point in the interminable day, he’ll run into Bryan.

Bryan: currently standing in the opposite corner of the elevator, leaning back against the wall with his hands gripping the metal handhold behind him, just a little too much tension in his shoulders. He reaches up and runs his finger along his collar, under his tie, like he needs to loosen it before it strangles him, and Miller lets out a weary sigh and does not hide that he is watching the long column of Bryan’s neck as he stretches it up. Bryan’s shoulders seem too broad for his shirt. His hair is too long, too: the way he’s always brushing it out of his eyes in the middle of conversations, swiping it away with the back of his hand.

His gaze wanders, at last, from the floor and the wall, to Miller’s face, and he asks, “What are you doing this weekend?“

A normal question. Just the sort of thing one co-worker asks another. Just the sort of conversation co-workers have. Unlike is that all right, whispered gravel-hard and secret-low, in the supply closet, in between kisses that are so frantic and so angry and so hard that they border sometimes on violence, uncontrollable long kisses, pressing each other up against the shelving units, trying not to knock over white out and boxes of staples and post-its. That is not the sort of thing that co-workers should do. Especially not when they are both men. Wrong and wrong on all counts.

Miller shrugs.

Nothing at all.

"Not sure yet. Why?”

“Just wondering. My friend just started working at this bar. I thought you might want to check it out with me. Maybe Friday.”

They both know what sort of bar he means.

Miller slides along the wall, closer, feeling the metal bar as it digs into his back like a guide. He feels the way that Bryan watches him, pretending not to watch him. “I guess it would be better than sitting around and waiting for the bombs to fall.”

This: a reference to a particularly macabre joke from the first conversation they had, alone in the office kitchen in the morning, Miller flipping through the previous day’s paper while they waited for the coffee to brew. Reagan calls Soviet Union the evil empire. He remembers Bryan taking down a mug from the cabinet, standing too close to him, remembers the clink of ceramic against the flecked gray countertop.

“Haven’t you heard?” Bryan asks, smiling, his voice tinged with a sick, false cheer that seems to be too much, even for him. “The Cold War is going to end soon. Any day now. Reagan will save us all.”

“Right—” He rolls his eyes, briefly reaches out his hand and lets his fingers graze against the side of Bryan’s leg, so fast and gone that even Bryan would hardly get the chance to notice them. And, low and bitter: “Reagan’s never done anything for me.”

Still. He’s still here. Still going on.

He tilts his head back, stares up toward the ceiling, wonders at the presence of hidden cameras, of secret, watching eyes. His floor soon. The smooth slide of the elevator into place, the bump of arrival, the settling before the parting of the doors.

“Sounds like fun,” he says, louder, glancing over just in time to meet Bryan’s eye. “Really. Send me the address and I’ll meet you there.”


	32. Bellamy/Raven: If I'm Wasting My Time While You Make Up Your Mind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on July 6, 2019, for anonymous on tumblr, as part of my 80s playlist series. Song inspiration: I Can't Wait by Stevie Nicks.

Raven’s almost died two, three times at least, and yet Bellamy’s here, wasting her time with uncertainty. As if everything that’s happened has only paralyzed him. Her first night out of medical, he visited her in her room, and it felt like the dreams she’d had sometimes, half conscious in recovery, feeling out the flares of pain in her leg, felt like those dreams that might have been real, when he held her hand spoke to her of unimportant things. He visited her in her new room and helped her undress. She wondered if this was a sort of penance he was doing: never fully looking at her face, treating her with gentleness and reverence and deep care. She felt like she was coming to understand him again, or for the first time.

He didn’t stay the night but since then, he’s kissed her in that same bed, and in his, and sitting at her desk while she’s sitting on his lap and her fingers tug as hard as they can at his curls. How else can she explain this particular need? They never leave bruises on each other but she feels the ghost images of his hands later on her hips, her leg, the small of her back, and her lips buzz for hours after he returns to his room.

Nothing else comes together: Camp Jaha grows cold, slowly freezing, adults talking by themselves behind closed doors, every day a new portion to the wall around the camp, and new rooms cleared of rubbish in the station. No one talks about Mount Weather, and Clarke does not come home.

Raven would like Bellamy to forget about Clarke, and everything of the past, to admit what is growing between them so it can flourish. She feels it. Never felt anything like it, never thought that feelings of this sort, bright and growing like a flame, like a raging bonfire within her, could exist, thought that love was something steady and reliable and dull. Something simply to be assumed. But not this. She understands that this is not a trick of her mind when he ducks his head down and presses his nose against her neck and breathes so hard she can hear the deep working of his lungs, and his whole body tenses and she has to hold him tight, and smooth down his hair, and bury her lips and her nose in his hair.

But he won’t say it. Won’t say almost anything, walks around camp like he owns it, confident, leaving heavy boot prints in the mud. Likes to pretend he isn’t known and can’t be known. But she was at the dropship camp, she’s felt him, she understands him in the same quick way she understands complex math problems or engineering diagrams: objectively, like a puzzle falling into place. With a heady rush and a spark.

They’re standing on opposite sides of the open doorway to Alpha Station, just inside the entrance. Raven’s on her feet but leaning heavily on her cane. A hard, cold rain like frozen silver is slashing down just outside, banging loud against the ship, clattering on the ground that is still frozen from the night before, and this is all she can hear. Bellamy asks her if her leg hurts too much, but she has to ask him to repeat what he said, and when he does, she can only shrug and yell back, “It’s all right.”

With any other man and in any other circumstance, this moment, by itself, would feel like an ending. But she asked him to meet her in the hangar deck last night, expecting not a confrontation or to level him with the ultimatum he deserves, but only to have an opportunity to look without distraction at his face. They sat on stools at one of the tables set up for sorting through junk, and held hands, and barely spoke. It was late and quiet but she could hear, like ghost steps, the thick sound of Guard boots patrolling the halls.

There’s talk of Bellamy entering the Guard now. Maybe. So the wildest things change, she’s come to live on the ground, and still he’s holding back a part of himself.

“Do you think we can be happy?” she asks, now, shouts over the endless roar of the rain. Because sometimes, in her moments of greatest certainty, she feels so happy that she’d dance and jump and twirl if only her body would let her again. And she can’t say she’s ever done these things.

“Everyone?” he says. “Or you and me?”

She waves her hand, waves the others off. “Let’s start with you and me.”

Bellamy takes a deep breath, then turns away, watching the downpour. The rain is coming down now even harder, with such a drumbeat against the side of the ship that even if he answered, even if he could, Raven’s not sure she would be able to hear him.


	33. Jasper/Octavia: Naked

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on July 8, 2019.

Jasper has been picturing Octavia Blake naked for months. Or rather, he has been imagining picturing her naked. Lacking a full data set, this is the best he can do. Every fantasy he has uncurls like tentative new leaves from the same stalk: the year he sat behind her in Mr. Pike’s sophomore chemistry class, memorizing the shape of her shoulders and the streaks of lighter brown in her dark brown hair, letting his mind wander to the far reaches on those rare occasions when she’d sweep her hair over her shoulder, and he’d catch sight of the bare skin on the back of her neck. On the last day of school, she wore a tank top and jeans with holes in the knees, and her hair up in a messy, haphazard bun; the AC was broken, and Mr. Pike opened the windows, and Jasper listened to the sounds of fourth period freshmen gym wafting up from the field down below, and the creak and hush of the fan in the corner of the room, and traced the patterns of the strands of hair falling free from the bun and sticking to the back of Octavia’s neck, memorized the placement of the three small birth marks on her shoulder like a particularly beautiful constellation of stars. She was already tan along her arms, though the skin of her back, peeking out above the top of her shirt, was winter pale. Her brother, he thought once, vaguely, would probably have a fit when he saw what she was wearing to school.

Not that anyone cares what anyone wears, or does, or says, on the last useless hot droning interminable wretched day of school.

Bellamy would also have a fit if he were here, now, sitting with them around the fire and toasting marshmallows on sticks, listening to the waves from the lake as they tumble over themselves on their way to the shore. Fox has brought a blanket, which she’s wrapped around her shoulders like a cape. Monty is burying his feet in the sand. No one’s spoken for a while, and aside from the waves and the crack and snap of the fire, which have combined into a sort of white noise, almost inaudible, only the quiet of a late summer night remains. The sun has long ago disappeared beneath the horizon’s edge and the half-moon above is dipping in and out of sight behind the clouds.

Into this, Octavia licks the melted marshmallow from her fingers and says, “We should go skinny dipping,” in deceptively bright, confident voice.

No one answers, and Jasper feels his face turn red. Monty bumps his shoulder against Jasper’s arm. Jasper stomps on Monty’s foot, and hopes no one but Monty notices.

“Why would we do that?” Miller asks. He’s stacked six marshmallows together on his stick, and he turns them now slowly, barely glancing up from the flicker of the flames slowly turning them brown to give Octavia a pointed Look.

“Why not do it?” she answers. She’s sitting up straight now, bouncing one knee up and down, gaze darting from one face to the next. “Come on. I never have before. I’ve always wanted to. And it’s summer, and high school’s halfway over.”

“Thank God,” Miller says under his breath, and Octavia kicks sand in his direction.

“Won’t the water be cold?” Fox asks. As if she were honestly considering it, which Jasper knows that he is not, just as surely as he knows that he cannot allow himself to consider it.

“So, it might be cold.” Octavia shrugs. She takes the measure of each of their faces in turn, one more time, except now when she reaches Jasper, she stops and gives him a wicked grin.

The burning feeling in his face gets worse. She’s not even seeing him; she’s seeing through him; she’s seeing every embarrassing fantasy he’s ever had, even the worst ones, the ones where he does not want her so much as he longs for her, the feeling in him terrifying not only for its strength but for its sweetness. How he would like not to kiss the three small dots on her shoulder, but trace them with his fingertips, in awe.

She tilts her head to the side. “Jasper?”

And what is he supposed to say to that?

She’s wearing a tank top again like on the last day of school, except this one is yellow, and when she throws it aside he watches only the arc of it, how it falls and then lands, a bright splash of color in the gloom, in the sand just at the edge of the shore. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees she’s standing with her back to him, that she has her arms crossed against her chest, that her hair has grown long over the course of the year and now hangs almost all the way down her back. How she is wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans. She looks over her shoulder at him and tells him, “Turn around.”

Their friends are back at the campfire, far enough away that, even watching them, and they are watching, they can see only two outlines of figures, standing just on the water’s edge.

He waits until she’s in the water, only her head above the surface, then makes a twirling motion with his finger and says, “Only fair.”

He’s never gotten undressed so fast in his life. He doesn’t hurry because he wants to be naked in the water with Octavia Blake. This thought is so terrifying that he’s half sure this is a nightmare seeping into the good sort of dream. But he doesn’t want to be naked and anywhere else other than the water for more than the shortest possible number of seconds, and so almost without thinking, he’s left everything behind to get covered in sand, and he’s slipped beneath the surface of the lake. The water is so cold that his first deep breath in is sharp, shocked, the full force of it almost frozen in his lungs.

“You okay?” Octavia asks. She’s giggling, bobbing up and down in the water. The clouds shift, the moon above now fully visible and clear, and in its light her skin seems to shine, almost to glow.

“I'm—getting used to it,” he says. The truth. The wide stones at the bottom of the lake are smooth and slick beneath his feet. The water smooth and cold, rippling along his skin.

For a moment, Octavia ducks down under the water, and when she reemerges, her hair is slick and wet and water is dripping from her nose. She has to take in a deep gasp of breath and wipe the water from her eyes. “That—” she says. “You have to try. It’s not skinny dipping if you don’t totally immerse yourself.”

“I think you’re changing the definition of—”

“Jasper, come on.”

She splashes him, and he pretends to be affronted, lets himself half-float a step or two away from her. But he’s smiling, he’s more at ease than he thought he could ever be, despite the pounding of his heart, and of course, because she’s right, he relents.

While he’s underwater, he closes his eyes. Only beneath the surface for a few seconds, doesn’t see a thing.

“Pretty great, huh?” Octavia says, when he comes up for air.

She’s half-floated a few steps closer to him again. Buoyancy, he thinks, disrupts gravity. People in the water do not behave as people on dry land.

Octavia reaches out and pushes his hair out of his face, and maybe he imagines the way her touch lingers on his forehead, but he’s quite sure that the way she traces her fingertips, briefly, along the shell of his ear—that that’s real. When she lets her hand fall back below the surface of the water, it makes a tiny splash. In the quiet, beneath the moonlight, small sounds like that one, like the waves, like the movements of their bodies and the sound of his own breath, seem to mean so much more than they should.

Every beat of his heart seems to mean so much more than it should. The goosebumps on his skin, the drops of water on her eyelashes, the thin scraps of clouds above dissipating, the clarity of the night sky.

He’ll try to play these moments again for himself later, but they are not to be recaptured. They are only to transform him, then to dissipate, and then they’re gone.


	34. Murphy/Emori: Forbidden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on July 21, 2019.

She and John have wormed their way into a number of forbidden spaces together, but Becca’s mansion is a next level con, an unprecedented coup. Emori wanders the upstairs rooms first, counting the bedrooms and the bathrooms, peaking in on a library, an office, a fancy living room, testing out the sureness of a balcony beneath her feet. “Whichever the best bedroom is, we should take it,” she says, as she slides open the door of a walk-in closet, still filled with clothes. The door doesn’t even stick. She glides it back and forth on its rollers, listening to the low shush of sound that it makes.

Behind her, John throws himself back on the bed, bouncing on it briefly and then coming to rest on his back, his feet in their muddy boots still on the floor, his arms outstretched to either side. “I’m pretty sure this is the best one,” he says, up to the ceiling. “This bed could sleep three people. Maybe four.”

They’ve tracked in footprints on the plush white carpet. A part of Emori is annoyed at them, for dirtying up such a pristine space, not because it is pristine but because it is _theirs_. Another part of her relishes every speck of dirt they leave— _their_ dirt in _their_ space, marks of them left behind. Not that anyone will be around to wonder: who left these marks, what dust-covered travelers slept in this bed, tried on these clothes, lounged between these sheets and fed each other food and kissed and fucked.

“It could,” she agrees, walking over to him, kneeling down next to the bed and grinning, as he flops his head to the side and looks at her. “But tonight it’s just for us.”

John has to roll himself all the way over onto his side just to reach her, but then his palm is sliding against her cheek, his fingers tangling in her hair; he leans up on his elbow and pulls her down into a kiss and she closes her eyes.

They’re still closed when she pulls away, barely an inch, and murmurs, “We’re never going to find anywhere more perfect than this.”

This is the apex. This is the find of all finds.

John kisses her cheek, lips pressed to her skin, lingering; she feels him smiling, feels the outlines of his words when he speaks. “Good thing we won’t ever have to live anywhere else, huh?”

She exhales and her breath is soft and shaking.

Her eyes flick open. She pulls far enough away to see his face. If there’s sadness there, or regret, or even a hint of mourning for the rest of their lives that will never be, she can’t find it, only a pure adoration, which reads this time almost as a challenge. She finds his hand with her ungloved hand and scratches at his fingers, squeezes to feel his bones.

“You’re not scared?”

He shakes his head, a barely visible movement. No one has ever held her gaze as long as John does, or with such patience.

“Do you know how many times I’ve almost died? No—do you know when I was first convinced I was going to die?”

“When your friends tried to—”

“When I was thirteen.” His voice is cutting, and she realizes that he is grabbing at her hand just as hard, that the bite of his nails is just as sharp. “When I was arrested.”

He’s told her this story before but only in bits and pieces, the only part of his life he’s ever seemed reluctant to explain. Everything else of themselves they have bared utterly. For the first time in a long time, he feels distant, not unknowable but unknown.

“So what I’m saying is that anything can happen,” he says. He lets go of her hand, gently touches her cheek. A strand of hair has fallen free of her headscarf. He tucks it behind her ear. “I’m not wasting time counting down to dying. I’m here and I’m with you.”

“That’s what matters,” she answers, though she’ll never be as sure as him. All she can do now is push these fears out of her head, because she’s here, and this world and this life will last the night, at least.


	35. Bellamy/Clarke: Don't Try to Save Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on July 27, 2019, for eosdawns on tumblr, as part of my 1990s/early 2000s playlist series. Song inspiration: Bitch by Meredith Brooks.

Clarke is halfway to the tree line when Bellamy calls out to her again, to wait, and though she’s screaming in her own mind to keep going, she stops and turns around instead. He’s still standing in front of the gates, with his dirt-streaked face and his open, honest eyes. He’s innocent, she thinks. He only helped her to do what she could not do alone, but now the burden of guilt should be only on her. Something she should leave with. Something she should take away from him.

But he’s staring and waiting, his shoulders slumped, everything about him sorry and defeated, and she wants to go to him. And she does.

They have a drink together in the old Alpha hangar deck. She takes off her gloves. She manages to smile. Her knee bumps up against Bellamy’s underneath the table and she knows that she’s done the right thing.

Two weeks later: she’s spent the whole day arranging and rearranging the furniture in the new quarters she’s been given, as well as she can, stripping the sheets off the bed, throwing her clothes out of the closet, dumping her art supplies on the table and then sweeping it clear. Nothing looks right. This is her home station, but it doesn’t feel like home—she should have run away into the woods. She should have returned to the dropship. She should have done anything else but turn around, like a fool.

Bellamy drops by in the evening to ask her to dinner. He doesn’t say a thing about the state of the room, but she knows that his doesn’t look like this, because he’s keeping himself together so well. So infuriatingly well. “I don’t want to fucking eat,” she snarls, and then he’s kneeling next to her, at the side of the bed, with her hands trapped in his hands like if he let her go, she might scratch and tear herself to pieces, which is exactly how she feels.

Another handful of days and she’s falling asleep in his bed, attuned to the steadiness of his lungs. She wakes up bleary in the middle of the night. His arm is still around her and she can’t see a thing, so she rearranges herself by touch. When the angry feelings burned themselves out, fatigue and a numb, frozen feeling seeped into their place. Now she feels pinprick emotions like pins and needles, all of herself coming back to life, but slowly, sharp tears burning at the corners of her eyes. Bellamy moves underneath her. At first, she thinks he’s only shifting in his sleep, but then she hears the quiet, wordless rumble of his voice, humming, feels the press of a kiss into her hair. She pulls herself up, drops her head onto the pillow next to him. They’re still tangled in each other. More tangled than before: the warmth and heaviness of his limbs, the warmth of his breath, the shine of his eyes in the dark.

She thinks she reads a question in them, but he doesn’t ask if she’s okay. The palm of his hand slides up to rest against her cheek.

“How can you stand me?” she whispers, and the words come out choked and low and wet. A better question: how is he still looking at her like he thinks she is the innocent one?

He doesn’t answer at first, but his hand moves to the back of her neck, and holds her steady there.

“This could be worse,” he says, at last, voice so rough she barely understands him. For a long time, she can’t parse his meaning at all. She’s tired, so bone-tired, from too many nights of intermittent sleep.

She’ll wake up tomorrow and feel better, or worse: like dropping everything and walking out the gates again, like marching into the Council Room and sitting at the head of the table, like barricading herself at the top of the arch with her sketchpad and her pencils until whatever is clawing at the insides of her makes its way out on the page, or just like staying in bed, with him. She doesn’t know.

He doesn’t either, but he hasn’t left, or kicked her out. He accepts her. He’d rather she be here, than not. So for now she can try to live with herself, too.


	36. Bellamy/Raven: Man What the Hell Happened

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on July 28, 2019, for anonymous on tumblr, as part my 1990s/early 2000s playlist series. Song inspiration: Walkin' on the Sun by Smash Mouth.

Everybody at the flea market is selling junk. Some of it is one, two generations old, and after twenty minutes of wandering through the aisles, Raven starts to feel like they’re on a mission through time, a mission without a goal, a free-floating wandering through the rubbish of the past, searching perhaps for treasure, or just wiling away hours. Summer is reaching its peak, the days long and lazy, the noonday sun high and bright in a cloudless sky. For a while, she and Bellamy walk between the booths together, sometimes holding hands. She’s not sure who reached for whose hand first or if she likes this development in things; his hand is sweaty, and she’s not used to being tethered to anyone.

They pass by a table selling old jewelry, burnished bronze and gold, that makes Raven think of someone’s great-aunt’s closet, musty, old gilt-edged boxes covered in dust. Then they stop for a while at a booth selling a miscellany so random, so without categorization, and so old, that she’s quite sure someone has died, and this is an unwanted inheritance. She knows something about that.

Later, they separate, for a time. The market is being held in the park and the grass, growing with abandon in the wildness of the season, catches at her ankles, a thick carpet beneath the soles of her sneakers. She finds a little tent selling second-hand books, and ducks in beneath the shade of it. Then sets to searching for a pattern to the makeshift shelves and the milk carton crates of old paperbacks, browned at the edges, eerie in the distorted gray light as it filters through the cloth walls. She’s picking her way through a crate of old children’s books from the seventies when she feels a light touch at her hip, and almost jumps.

She drops the book she’s holding and turns.

Bellamy’s hand slips around her waist, half-encircling her. He’s wonderfully close in the heat and the dulled light of the sun.

“Kids books, Reyes?” he asks. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Funny,” she huffs. She leans her hip back against the folding table, carefully, and he steps closer. He’s still smirking, that half-smile she knows well because it was an expression he wore all the time, when they first met. Not that long ago. “I was looking to see if they have any of the books my grandmother used to have—” She breaks off, not caring to fully explain, glances down and sees that he’s holding a couple records in his other hand, tucked in against his side. “Vinyl, Blake?” She quirks her eyebrows up. “Do you even own a record player?”

“Yeah, actually, I do.” He scoffs, and steps back; she breathes a little easier, feels the heat of being so close rising belatedly to her cheeks. She’s not embarrassed to be wrong. Somehow, now that he’s said it, she isn’t surprised. They haven’t spent much time at his place, because he has roommates, and at least one of them always seems to be around. But she can picture his room, with its neatly made bed and messy bookshelves, and the record player in the corner, probably on the floor because he has no other place for it, and—

“Let me guess.” She falls into step beside him again, slides her hand into his hand again. “You’re into sixties rock. You like to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling and listen to… Led Zeppelin. The Doors. And get high off Monty’s stash—”

“That was _one_ time.”

The first time they met, sitting in the window seat in his living room with a view of the skyline at dusk, and every small moment grown large, like their fingers touching as he passed her the joint he’d inexpertly rolled, or their knees knocking together, or the smoky taste of his breath when he kissed her, and it felt first-kiss awkward and beautiful all at once.

“But I’m right about the rest of it,” she says, and squeezes his hand.

Bellamy neither confirms nor denies, but as they step out into the full sheen of the sun, he squints against the brightness and says, “It just sounds different.”

“Sounds like some weird nostalgia,” Raven answers. “Do you really think the past was better?”

“I think people cared, more than they care now.”

This answer is so vague and so beneath him that Raven almost calls him on it, except he winces, frustrated with himself, and tries again before she can.

“I mean—we’re all so complacent now. I am, sometimes. Too often.”

His voice drops, and he won’t look at her, and Raven wonders if this is some sort of confession. Or something maybe that he’s only working out for himself.

“What’s that curse?” she says. Softer this time. “May you live in interesting times? Are you sure you’re not just—wishing for interesting times?”

“That’s the thing!” He glances over to her, and for a moment she sees that his eyes are animated and bright. “These _are_ interesting times. The end of a millennium. But—Yeah, maybe I do wish more people knew we weren’t living at the end of history.”

His hand is large and warm in hers, palm sweating in the heat. Raven considers this for a long moment: the end of history. The illusion of security. Would she rather drop out of everything, braid flowers in her hair—drum circle in the park, or whatever people did, then, before they got disillusioned, dropped back in, put their old books and records and jewelry in boxes and crates and gave all of the past away to strangers, who are searching without knowing they are searching, with no narrative for searching?

“If this were the end, that would be pretty bleak,” she says, at last. And before he can tell her _that’s not what I mean_ : “Let’s go back to your place. I need to see this record player to believe it.”


	37. Murphy/Raven: Wasted/Wasting Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on July 20, 2019, for clarkesablake on tumblr, as part my 1990s/early 2000s playlist series. Song inspiration: Hold My Hand, by Hootie and the Blowfish.

On the first warm evening of summer, Murphy drags the standing fan into the kitchen, sets it up to the right of the doorway and turns it on, then climbs up onto a chair to open the only window, a long, narrow rectangle set into the wall above the kitchen table. It’s a casement window, and the handle always sticks. He has to balance carefully and put some effort into shoving it out and up, but when he does, it lifts with a satisfying force and a low shush of sound, and lets in a burst of fresh, sweet early-season air, evening-cool and clear.

The window doesn’t look out on much, only the slanted roof of the garage, and, from the right angle, a hint of sky, now a slowly deepening blue: the sort of view that makes him feel like he’s underground, without any of the pleasure of actually crawling down into the dirt. On the windowsill are arranged three hardy cacti, housewarming gifts from Monty. The only plant, Murphy had joked, that he probably wouldn’t accidentally kill. He almost knocks one over when he opens the window, scratches his hand on one of its spikes as he saves it from falling just in time.

“Careful, Murphy,” Reyes says, from where she’s sitting in the other kitchen chair. “Don’t want to stab yourself.” She’s leaning back so the chair’s front legs lift off the floor, though not far enough to run any risk of falling back against the fridge.

“Who says I don’t,” he answers, deadpan, and hops down to the floor again. His boots thump on the linoleum, and Reyes pretends she isn’t smiling. 

It’s not much of a smile, anyway, which doesn’t surprise him, because she’s been sullen and quiet all night. Hanging out, eating leftover takeout on his couch and watching bits and pieces of old movies on tv, and then instead of leaving, settling in his kitchen, drinking his second to last beer, because she knows he won’t kick her out or because she wants his company, or maybe needs it, he doesn’t know. Now she tips the bottle back and he watches the light from the overhead glint off the glass, and then watches her face, the moment she sets the bottle down and briefly closes her eyes, and for that second she looks distant and—flick of tongue across her lips, breathing out through her open mouth—a little sad.

He walks over to the fridge and grabs a bottle for himself. The sucking sound of the door opening, the shade of the light and the cool uncurling of the air inside are a distraction, slight interruptions to the silence.

“Your plants are looking a little dry,” Reyes says.

Murphy closes the door again, slumps down into the chair across from her. “They’re cacti,” he reminds her, working his thumb beneath the cap of his beer. “They’re supposed to be dry. Watering them too much,” he adds—cap flipping off, clattering down to the tabletop—"is worse than not watering them enough.“

"Idiot proof plants,” she jokes. Bit of a genuine smile on her face, at least, and this is the sort of comment she wouldn’t make if she really meant it, so he’s not mad.

“Ha, ha. They also don’t like bad jokes though, so maybe you shouldn’t try to be funny.”

Through the open window: the steady, riotous hum of insect-sound, a sure sign of summer, already building. Raven doesn’t answer, but after a few moments, the half-smile fades from her face. She holds the bottle by the neck and runs her thumb nail up and down the glass, like she’s picking at an imperfection that only she can see. Murphy’s tired, and every time the fan cycles to the right, it rocks briefly on its base and then turns left with a predictable, high, creaking sound, and he’s not sure how many times he’ll have to hear that noise before he just asks her why she’s here. Why she’s still here, why she’s here with him, instead of someone else. Her other hand is sitting, palm down and fingers slightly curled, on the tabletop, and maybe he’d like to reach for it, maybe he’d like to hold it in his own.

“I think I might be going down to Florida,” she says, then, after a while. She flicks her gaze up at him beneath her lashes, like she’s waiting for some big reaction. Or any reaction.

“Florida? Why?” His tone dismissive, borderline disgusted, but alarm bells in his head, hoping she’s talking about a trip or a visit and not some permanent moving-away thing.

She takes a deep breath, like she’s going to be serious with him. But only answers: “Family shit,” like whatever it is, it’s beneath her.

But she doesn’t talk about her family much, ever, and he can see every tensely held angle of her body, how she’s leaning in across the table, crossing her ankles, biting her lip. He tells himself that she’ll talk when he’s ready, then reminds himself that she is talking, she is ready.

“Yeah, so how long are you going to be down there?”

She shrugs. “Not too long. Maybe a week. I was thinking of driving down—”

“In your car?” Truly amused this time, he barks out the question without thinking, but doesn’t back down when her gaze snaps up and she glares at him. “Your AC won’t make it.” He knows she’s about to argue, so he sits back and shrugs and says, “Just use mine.”

Her hand is still sitting on the table. He thinks again about reaching for it, trying out the comfort of touch, but then she might think that he’s out here with an ulterior motive, that he wants something from her, when instead all he feels is the very rare and very odd and slightly uncomfortable, true-blue genuine desire to help.

“All the work you put into it, it’s half your car anyway,” he adds. And that makes her smile. Small and real, bringing a softness to her face.

“I guess that’s true. But hey—” She slides her arm across the table, and her fingers briefly graze against his wrist—as if she needed any help getting his attention. It’s already fixed on her. “If you’re up to it, you can come.”

If he’s up to it? He’d mock her for this invitation that might be a curse, roping him into Reyes family shit when he’s just trying to be nice—but he feels warm with something other than the warm air through the window, the stuffy, narrow kitchen in June. Warm with something he can’t yet name. So he just curls up the corner of his mouth in a smirk and says, “I’m there.”


	38. Bellamy/Raven: Not Like You to Say Sorry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on August 2, 2019, for jellamyjake on tumblr, as part of my 1990s/early 2000s playlist series. Song inspiration: How You Remind Me by Nickelback.

Clarke leaves. She doesn’t even come through the gate, just turns around and disappears into the trees. Raven doesn’t hear about this until later; her first few days back at Camp Jaha are a delirium, in and out of consciousness, living through the haze of Monty’s herbal medicine, the thudding pain in her leg whenever it starts to clear. Visitors in and out. When Bellamy fills her in, later, weary and slumped low in the seat next to her bed, she is too tired to feel angry. Anger comes later. For all of them.

Kane and Abby try to pick up the pieces. The wall goes up, and the guard stations looking out from the perimeter, rumors of underground negotiations with the Grounders follow but she’s not privy to those anymore, to the mechanisms of power, slowly grinding. She moves into her own quarters. She settles into her work and lets distances grow. Bellamy she lets in sometimes, because he does not ask for much. Mostly he’s looking for someone who won’t ask him to talk, who won’t ask anything of him. 

When Farm Station returns, Raven stands back, and waits. She watches the reunions. No one left for her to reunite with now. She catalogues all of the changes in the returnees, and she wonders if the dropship camp survivors were like this, seemed like this, distant and altered and insular, their integration not like loved ones returned but like strangers, trying to fit themselves in to spaces that are not quite the right shape, trying to recreate memories that do not feel quite true.

 _Easier, isn’t it_ , she asks Bellamy, _to have no one_. They’re sitting together at dinner, at a corner table by themselves, and he’s become near silent and even harder to reach. So she’s not surprised when he allies himself with Pike later: she saw this anger growing in the inward slant of his eyebrows, the hard grip of his fingers around his fork. A long time coming. Since Clarke left at least and maybe longer, maybe his whole life. She’s sharp enough to know that Pike’s Chancellorship won’t end well but also smart enough not to involve herself. Bitter enough to know there are no good options. Bellamy’s anger seems to give him life: the first time he kisses her, he feels, pressed against her and the hard planes of his back beneath her palms, and the jagged edge of his teeth pulling at her lip, like he did when they first met on Earth, just as reckless, just as dangerous.

War threatens, violence seeping in. She picks her side. On the edge of the precipice, they back down, the new government folds, and the mood in camp is that of a body, after a long run, holding its breath because it cannot breathe and then exhaling in a great rush, forcing itself not to collapse. Kane takes over the Chancellorship, because no one else wants the job. Autumn hardens again into winter, a harder winter than the last, and Raven starts to sleep under thick blankets of furs.

In the spring, Kane sends out groups to search for more stations. A long shot mission, but the Earth is wide and strange and Raven is glad to explore it. Bellamy is in her unit. He seems to be thawing as the ground has thawed, and at night by the fire he tells her that he wants to be different, and she can almost pretend that she knows what he means. Puts her hand on his knee and watches the inconsistent glow of the flames reflecting on his skin. Just watches for a long time. In the quiet of the night, the insect sound, the others snoring in their sleeping bags and in the back of the Rover, she feels no hurry at all.

 _Anonymous_ , he says. He wants to be anonymous. And she understands that he’s carried a weight on his back for a long time.

They find, eventually, remnants of Hydro Station out west. Signs of a rudimentary settlement tell them that there were survivors, but no one is left now. Maybe the hard winter did them in. Maybe the Grounders took them. Maybe they went willingly. The rescue mission scavenges for parts and marks the site on their maps, and then goes home

No other stations are ever found.

Five of the twelve made it, in one form or another. More than they were expecting, Kane says, and Raven feels a deep settled numbness all through her. She sees it all from above: macro plans, the survival of the group, and along the way individuals are lost, and lost, and lost.

Two years later, Bellamy leaves. Raven’s living in a cabin by then, with five roommates, and everything around her is something she helped build with her own hands. This is not utopia but at least something more like she imagined Earth would be, when she dared to imagine it: something she can settle into. Something she is beginning to understand. Still she knows, better than most people, because she knows _him_ better than most, why Bellamy can’t stay.

She waits, a year, another handful of months, and when the season changes again, she recognizes that she has been waiting, and she takes the Rover, and she follows him. The air is brisk and cool and leaves her refreshed, fully aware of and honest with herself. She is twenty-three and has lived on the ground for five years.

She finds him in a tiny little cabin, some way south of Arkadia. Autumn does not quite feel like autumn yet, here; she’s too warm in her jacket, and that’s all she can think, when she sees him: that the angle of the sun is too high, she cannot do anything but squint into it, and a line of sweat is drawing its way down her neck, down her spine, heat pricking all along her skin. Bellamy is wearing old clothes he must have dug up right before he left, clothes she remembers from the dropship. He has started to grow a beard. That night, she runs her hand along his jaw. _Scruffy_ , she says, not quite smiling.

He takes her hair down and lets it fall over her shoulders, cards his large fingers through it awkwardly, as if he is no longer used to human touch.

 _You’ve grown your hair out_ , he says, not smiling at all. He sounds awed, and she wonders if it’s her, or just the presence of another person in his space again. She wants to ask him why he left, really, what he thought this would do. But then she remembers what she believed when he rode off and decides that, of course, she was probably right. He’s just lost. So lost that he cannot remember any other way of being, cannot trace his way back to a place where he last felt safe and real and whole.

 _You here to take me home?_ he asks.

Raven shakes her head. He’s slipped his arm around her waist, and she leans in now, and tucks her nose in against his neck. _I don’t know_ , she says, _I don’t know why I’m here_ , and tangles her fingers in his curls, tugging and pulling and hoping to cause an edge of pain, and bringing him down, down to her, until his mouth has found hers once again.


End file.
